Fletcher D-Prize 2022 Launch: Poverty Venture Solution Competition
by myFletcher
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The Fletcher D-Prize funds entrepreneurs who increase access to proven poverty interventions.
The world has already invented ways to end poverty, yet the best interventions are not being distributed at mass-scale. Can you design a business or NGO that solves one of the Distribution Challenges like education or agriculture?
If selected, The Fletcher D-Prize will award you up to $20,000 in cash to launch a pilot in any region where extreme poverty exists. For more details, visit: http://www.fletcher.tufts.edu/d-prize.
During this info session, you'll be inspired by the impact you can have, learn more about the competition from Will Snider, Program Manager at the D-Prize. You'll also brainstorm ideas with fellow students and meet the last winners, Mohit Sahni, F'21 and Nitin Malik, F'20 who won for their venture Resonance Lab in early 2020.  Nitin and Mohit received $13,000 in seed capital from the Fletcher D-Prize to launch their pilot in India. Lastly, you'll hear about all the entrepreneurial resources available to support you on this journey through the Derby Entrepreneurship Center (DEC).
** COOL SNACKS WILL BE PROVIDED **
 
@ IBGC_Fletcher #IBGCSpeaks #DPrize
Eight years ago, the Fletcher School/Tufts University and The D-Prize launched a unique social entrepreneurship competition, combining Fletcher's interdisciplinary, holistic problem solving around the world's most pressing development issues with D-Prize's ability to find and fund poverty fighting ventures.┬áImagine, you can distribute a proven social venture idea, receive valuable feedback from venture capitalists, and win up to $20K in cash with additional $10K in-kind support to start your venture. And you can fulfill your capstone requirement all while doing your summer internship or making it a post Fletcher/Tufts experience that builds your business skills – all while having real world impact.
That's exactly what's happening for Mohit and Nitin. They plan to target an addressable market of ~20 million rural customers in four power-deprived states in India over the next five years. They received $13K in pilot seed funding from the Fletcher D-Prize. They also won the Tufts New Ideas Competition, receiving an additional $1K in funding.  Come and hear how they are bringing solar energy access first to Jarkhand, a rural state in eastern India.
Where
Cabot 702
United States
Speakers
Will Snider
Program Manager
D-Prize
https://www.linkedin.com/in/wisnider/
Will is the Operations Lead at D-Prize, where he leads global competitions and was a founding member of the judge team. D-Prize uses a competition format to locate and launch new "distribution entrepreneurs" - social entrepreneurs who start new ventures that distribute proven life-enhancing technologies to millions of people living in extreme poverty. Prior to joining D-Prize, Will was an early employee of One Acre Fund in Kenya and Ethiopia, where he worked to distribute agricultural inputs to the last mile.
Elaine Chen
Director
Derby Entrepreneurship Center/Tufts University
https://www.linkedin.com/in/elaineychen/
Elaine is the Cummings Family Professor of the Practice of Entrepreneurship and Director of the Derby Entrepreneurship Center at Tufts University.
Prior to joining Tufts, Elaine served as Senior Lecturer and Entrepreneur-in-Residence for nearly a decade at the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship, teaching entrepreneurship in startup, corporate, non-profit and government settings to students at all stages of their educational and professional journeys. Elaine founded and led the implementation of multiple academic and co-curricular offerings at MIT. She designed a new course on corporate entrepreneurship, reimagined entry-level and advanced entrepreneurship courses, coached hundreds of student entrepreneurs every year, and spearheaded the development of platforms and infrastructure that use technology to scale up access to entrepreneurship education - on and off-campus.
Elaine plays an active role in entrepreneurship enablement in the community. She received the MIT Monosson Prize for Entrepreneurship Mentoring in recognition of her impact on entrepreneurship education. She was selected by the American Academy for the Advancement of Science and Lemelson Foundation to serve as an Invention Ambassador. She also served on the board of the MIT Enterprise Forum of Cambridge, a non-profit organization that helps early-stage entrepreneurs succeed.
Elaine brings a wealth of experience to Tufts, having served as an engineering and product management VP at six companies, including Rethink Robotics, Zeo, Zeemote, and SensAble Technologies. She has brought numerous hardware and software products to market and holds 22 patents. As Founder and Managing Director of ConceptSpring, a corporate innovation and entrepreneurship consulting company, Elaine helps corporate leaders build entrepreneurial organizations via innovation consulting and custom training programs to clients in industries ranging from healthcare IT, industrial automation and robotics, consumer electronics to retail innovation, FinTech, non-profits, government agencies and more.
As a thought leader, keynote speaker, and author, Elaine has been featured in Xconomy, TechCrunch, Huffington Post, Forbes and Fortune. She is author of Bringing a Hardware Product to Market: Navigating the Wild Ride from Concept to Mass Production. She has extensive international experience with particular expertise in the Asia-Pacific area.
Elaine received her BS and MS degrees in Mechanical Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.