November 2004

The Story Behind One Bright Idea

by Dean Robert Joss

One of the most exciting stories to come out of the Business School recently has to do with a venture started by recent Stanford business and engineering graduates. Their idea developed in an unusual project-based elective and is a vivid illustration of how Stanford provides an environment in which students are encouraged to be innovative, apply entrepreneurial skills, work in teams across disciplines, and develop a sense of social accountability.

In 2003, the students enrolled in an experimental one-quarter seminar called the Social Entrepreneurship Startup, designed to apply the intellectual energy of students and faculty to a social need. The class looked at developing a cheap, clean lighting system that could service people in the developing world who live without electricity. As many as 1.5 billion people light their homes with kerosene, a dangerous and polluting fuel.

The class was taught by the Business School's James Patell along with Bill Behrman and David Kelley of the School of Engineering. In the preceding quarter, professor Behrman worked with 14 undergraduate students to research the needs of developing countries and concluded that China, India, and Mexico would be the best places to start. Using the research from the first quarter, 21 graduate students from the Business School and the Engineering School set to work on prototypes and business plans. The course is an excellent example of the project-oriented, cross-disciplinary, and team-based experiential learning that our faculty members are introducing more and more into the curriculum. But the outcome of this particular class exceeded all our expectations.

The course resulted in Ignite Innovations, a startup that is working to bring light to the developing world. For now, Ignite is focused on India. While this is a for-profit effort, the company has a social purpose. "Charity alone is not enough; we believe lighting the entrepreneurial flame of market forces is the best way of igniting the fire of social change," says the company's website.

During their 2003 elective, students discovered that kerosene was surprisingly expensive, eating up about 4 percent of a typical rural family's monthly income. Gathering information like the cost of kerosene was a critical part of the research that went into the development of the Ignite Light, a solar-powered lamp built around a light-emitting diode (LED). In just 10 weeks, class members studied low-cost technologies, developed several prototype lamps, and drafted business plans for manufacturing and distribution.

The lightweight lantern produces nearly 50 times the amount of useful light per dollar of a conventional bulb and up to 200 times more useful light than a kerosene lamp, the students calculated. The company is now grappling with prototypes and factory specs. "Focusing on the world's largest problems is really exciting," Matt Scott, MBA '03, one of the founders, told our Business School Advisory Council during a visit earlier this year. "To really do this requires a new way of thinking." The company's vision is to someday create a nonprofit foundation "that can afford to put social objectives first" and provide resources to develop other products, such as an affordable way to purify drinking water that Ignite Innovations can bring to market. Working on the project, students said, helped them develop new skills, including the ability to improvise.

These sorts of opportunities not only give our students exposure to problem-solving experiences they would otherwise not have but also provide opportunities to make a difference. Scott, for one, passed up a consulting offer to pursue Ignite. "This came out of left field," he has said. "This is a movement proving you can do good things and have a financially self-sustaining life at the same time." Mechanical engineering graduate Sally Madsen, an Ignite co-founder, explained that "this is exactly the kind of career I hoped I would find at Stanford."

Indeed, the Business School, through its 33-year-old Public Management Program and the Center for Social Innovation, has inspired scores of students to develop ideas and take on challenges that will have social impact in both the nonprofit and the for-profit sectors.

Like the elective that spawned Ignite Innovations, we are excited about another new two-quarter elective this year: Biodesign Innovation, a class that will identify new devices for unmet medical needs and develop prototypes and business plans for them. Business School professor Stefanos Zenios will teach the course with faculty from medicine and engineering. In the sort of mixed teams that students will someday encounter on the job, our future MBAs will work with peers from across campus on projects that span the curricula of all three schools. With classes like these that capitalize on teaching across the Stanford campus, I know our students will be getting experiences that show them they can make a difference.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY ANNE KNUDSEN