A BCom Blog by Monique Wong



What is a better way to name an entrepreneurship venture than “DreamNow”? Entrepreneurship is the epitome of thinking big and realizing the thinking. DreamNow is a non-profit organization that helps others do the same, helping others build projects that do good, that are cool, that make sense, that are self-sustainable.

DreamNow is the prime example of entrepreneurship. It offers new services never offered before. For example, Continuum is a service that follows up with delegates after an inspiring event to make sure energy is turned into effective action. There is definitely demand for this type of service for post-conference actions are always planned but hardly executed. DreamNow is building potential for ideas and is established based the market demand and supply for innovative ideas. It is investing in a new market never fully realized before.

Unlike traditional businesses, however, DreamNow is not focused on wealth creation, but it’s primary purpose is to not blindly allow people lose the value of powerful ideas. The wealth that is described in “A Definition of Entrepreneurship” on QuickMBA.com for DreamNow is the positive impact ideas can have on society and the risk to not having DreamNow is society’s loss to innovative action and change.

This image, for me, represents entrepreneurship.

It always seems too good to be true. To trade $10 for $12. To be given a free meal. There must be a catch. And yes there is, that is the risk.

I’ve never been a big fan of finance. Coming from a modest family, playing with money – the risk is too big to lose it. Especially with 2008 financial crisis, to disguise risk and be fooled by it is simply too easy. But there is one thing in finance that I find meaningful – loans to sustainable startups.

Last Friday, I attended the Chasing Sustainability Conference at the Liu Institute for Global Issues. The first speaker was David Berge, Senior Vice President of Community Investment at Vancity. He spoke of Vancity’s values of the triple bottom line and investing in businesses that were sustainable. These values reflected in which business startups Vancity decided to lend money to and the causes that Vancity gave grants to. David described how a lot of the time sustainable practices of a company were coincidentally also best management practices. To be sustainable is to build a business for multiple generations – for example, not depleting our natural resources so that future generations can enjoy them also – and not just keeping one generation’s of profits in mind. To treat employees well by letting them spend a portion of their paid time working on a project them find meaningful is building positive organizational culture and fostering employee vitality.

Finance is the most powerful when it meets values. For Vancity to invest exclusively in startups that are sustainable (and coincidentally well-managed!) builds capacity for the community. As a young woman looking to be an entrepreneur of a triple bottom line social enterprise, I thank Vancity and any other financial institution with similar business goals and values.

Update: November 30, 2010

I recently ran into an article in Maclean’s titled “Microfinance Meltdown” leading me to rethink this blog post. This article reports on certain microfinance players in developing countries who have been charging high interest rates on their loans. These rates reach up to 30%. It makes me extremely sad and worried to hear that such an effective means of promoting sustainable growth can be dirtied by unethical firms.

Economic, social and environmental. But economic does not always mean profit. At least not in the sense a new environmentally conscious economic paradigm would put it.

Think for a second. What if the products you bought at the supermarket not only had nutrition labels on it – but environmental footprint labels. This means, what kind of environmental footprint the making of that plastic water bottle had. That means, to what distances my banana traveled to get to my grocery bag (re-usable one of course!) And finally, if a product’s prices reflected that.

This is what Kalle Lasn suggests in her article “A New Kind of Global Marketplace”.

When we speak of, in business school, to have an integrated strategy to put forward the idea of environmental sustainability, I don’t believe anything can be as effective as making concerns for the environment a habit – like putting on our seatbelt. A simple way to go about this is to change what fundamentally drives the market – prices. No other strategy can be more so integrated than incessantly measuring environmental as well as economic impact, especially when it is imperative to reflect environmental impact in the pricing of a product. This type of sustainability will ensure that as the word sustainability truly means – to allow our future generations to reap the same economic benefits from our natural resources as our generation can now.

Staring intently  at my computer screen, I am, without a choice, bombarded with marketing messages. Whether I want to or not. But there is one type of marketing message that I don’t mind be drowned in, that I don’t mind reading, seeing and listening more of. One that I don’t mind feeling manipulated by.

And that is social marketing. Like the karma commercial and advertisements of the Return-It program!

The principles of brand positioning are the same and the reasons for successful brand positioning is even more compelling. “Consumers are bombarded with a continuous stream of advertising” (QuickMBA, Marketing) and that’s true and because of that seemingly neutral social messages hardly get into the minds of the consumers. Without catchy gimmicks like “Don’t mess with karma”, it’s hard to gain anybody’s attention.

Much of social advertising for a socially responsible message though, is not about being number one and with messages that advocate for environmental stewardship, it is in a sense a repositioning of previous bad habits or undesirable behaviors. A message or a “big idea” that appeals to everyone is important – unlike a positioning of a product that is made for a specific type of audience. “Green is the new black” for example, is a message most people can relate to and tries to reposition green environmental initiatives as being desirable and trendy.

Especially with social topics sensitive to apathy, each message has to bridge the gap through points of parity and leverage the new message through compelling points of difference. Without doing so, an ignored message is a common pitfall. In the example of Return-It’s ad campaign, recycling is their point of parity, establishing a frame of reference that consumers can relate to and karma is their point of difference. By relating back to a fundamental belief of karma – that good things will happen to people who do good – the audience is more likely to accept this message.

Marketing is without a doubt a tool that can be used for social good or to society’s detriment. An environmentalist myself, I believe it is the singular most important tool to create awareness for social change.

If a business were a person, a business plan would be the person’s DNA makeup, their physical features, their personality, their manner of speech, their thought processes and ultimately, what the person is destined to be five, ten and twenty years down the road. Just like a person’s life – impossible to predict and full of ups and downs and risks.

Why do we write a business plan then? Also the same reason we plan out our lives. We don’t want to end up failing. Yet, like a life, a business is so fragile that with the most intricate and detailed of plans, many start-ups fail.

Finding out what a business plan entails is quite a fright to me because I used to account for failures of businesses commonly for a lack of foresight, that the people in charge of the business didn’t do enough planning. But no, business plans require you to pour your heart out about the business.

Business plans are not only written for investors who you want, but ultimately for those on the team of the business. Maybe the failure of a business is failure to follow a business plan. Or maybe failure can account for a poor business plan. Or neither. But ultimately, a plan better prepares a business for success.

Why are ethics important for a business? Not only are “good managers morally strong managers” and do “good ethics mean good business”, but ethics also makes businesses sustainable.

As a first year BCom student, an environmentalist and a socially conscious Gen-Zer, I am wary of the control of the corporation on our everyday lives. From the brand of cereal I eat for breakfast to the overhead ads on the bus I take to school and the commercials I hear on the radio, I spend my life inundated by the propaganda of the corporation. But primarily as humans, we are citizens of the world and the environment around us before we become businessmen. Putting our the advancement of society and the protection of the environment should be the front and foremost requirement before the earning of profit should be considered.

This means that THERE ARE NO EXTERNALITIES. Environmental concerns will come bite you back in the behind if you continuously use up natural resources are not aware of conservation. At the end of the day, your business will be forced to end if it is always focused on taking and not giving back.

You can’t earn money without people buying into your brand. You can’t get people to buy into your brand when nobody gives you the money to run a marketing team. Creativity and numbers have to meet in business.
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Marketing is about being creative about making your product stand out. It’s about the consumer at all times. Selling the benefits, not the features makes the product tangible. These benefits come together to create the brand. In an ad, this image of the brand is what needs to be brought out.

Maybe it is important after all for a Marketing-aspiring me to get on top of these numbers!

Business is truly interdisciplinary, taking into account a mathematical discipline as well as requiring logic, rationality and analysis. It deals with the social aspect of life, being an essential part of social change and progress, but is also a science in its analysis of the economy with its theories, evidence and predictions. Finally, it takes a daring character to be able to take calculated risks and the confidence and foresight to succeed. Marketing and accounting aren’t the only two business applications that are intertwined in its fate – there are many others to follow in Commerce 101.

And bold has Research In Motion been in the recent negotiations with United States Emirates and other Middle Eastern countries. RIM has become a beacon of light for the many Middle Eastern human rights activists, not having immediately complied with access to information requests for Middle Eastern governments. Governments of India and Saudi Arabia argue that such a measure is necessary for national security. It is this fight against censorship and freedom of communication that many technology companies like RIM, Google and Yahoo! have to face now – to appease local governments or to stay true to the foundational Western freedoms.

RIM has to be conscious of the company’s future. With its market share in North American markets being eaten away by Apple’s iPhone 4, RIM’s future stands in foreign markets. On one hand, as little friction with foreign governments is preferred for the threatened ban of corporate e-mail and Blackberry Messenger will shut out RIM’s advantage over other telecommunication devices. On the other hand, RIM has to be wary of its reputation with its customers surrounding ethics and social conscience.

For the Blackberry users in the Middle East however, their choice is clear. The Blackberry, like other iconic communication tools in our time, has served to bring together individuals for positive social change. Interviewed by Maclean’s, Nabeel Rajab of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights is representative of this population, citing that “Since the BlackBerry arrived, activists and human rights defenders have depended heavily on it to spread their activities and the culture of human rights”.

What is RIM’s choice going to be? Are they going to take a stance against this technology “cold war”?