Putting it all together

Enginuity is an attempt at tapping into the world’s most precious, renewable resrouce: our potential. The United Nations defined a list of Millenium Goals, missions deemed crucial to ensure that all humans have access to their human rights. Many of these goals are being chased by a plethora of organizations at both grassroots and global levels. Enginuity is the concept that the most efficient solution is the most effective, and that is education and empowerment. IT is a firm which leverages STEM education to combat climate change and poverty, supported by the market through the gamification of mission-based tasks.

Opportunity:

Millenials are becoming more aware that they are going to inherit a planet left far more depleted of its resources than what was once thought. As social media becomes an increasingly prominent influence in our lives more and more people are being driven to act based on their expected image outcomes, essentially including public self-image in rational decision making processes. This trend is evident in the American and European regions, and may be present in varying degrees in other regions. Millennials today satisfy this need through posting about causes they support on social media, and participating in activities which have perceived social value – even if the activity is in reality not effective at achieving its intended purpose. With the rise of many for profit institutions which capitalize on this phenomenon, cursory market evaluations seem to put the market size in the tens of billions. This window will remain indefinitely until either the problems with which people may align themselves are gone, or until people stop pandering to their self-image.

Innovation:

Other organizations that attempt to gamify this process rely on two strategies: gift in exchange for service, and ambassadorship. The former relies on individuals purchasing a product with the intent of supporting an organization which either donates to or directly influences public programs, and the latter relies on tiering rewards for participating individuals. Many of the organizations which use these practices are for profit institutions. We intend on augmenting these models to fit into a social-enterprise hybrid partnership between a nonprofit and for profit where the shared resources allow for cost effective program implementation, and the for-profit organizations ability to raise funds with a profit motive allow for easy access to capital flow. The for profit will have incentive to aid the nonprofit because of the shared resources, and the nonprofit will benefit from the same shared access. Strict limits will be placed on how funds are used based on their source of origin, and the point of this partnership is simply to provide a model for how for-profit and nonprofit governance can exist symbiotically. We will provide a similar service to ambassadorship and allow people to participate in activities where they may redeem points for public projects and have their social media likeness be associated with those direct public benefits, and also offer individual discounts in the store which will offer educational supplies as well as mission-oriented supplies, such as zero-waste starter kits, reusable bottles, metal and bamboo straws, clothing, and more. In essence we are leveraging people’s public image to generate value.

Venture Concept:

Competitors involve Creations for a Cause and 4Ocean, two for profit organizations which have used the above practices to develop their markets. However both of these organizations have questionable backgrounds and do not release many of their financial data. Because we will be packaging our items in tiers, provide incentives for long-term involvement, and make our financial data public as per the regulations on 501(c)3 nonprofit organizations, we will have an edge.

Our secret sauce will be our hybrid business model which makes use of gamification to foster brand loyalty. To begin, we will create educational media and partner with schools to offer it to students, and the students will then be able to use those in-class projects to receive personal credits as well as secure project kits for their school. In doing so they will be creating content for our social media platforms. We will then develop the ambassadorship program and make it available to a larger audience once enough content has been captured for social media deployment. Once Enginuity develops into a sustainable operation, I plan on scaling it up to include sustainability solutions projects and develop a program where we support top-ranking students into their college-level STEM studies and then offer them positions with us to bolster their resume before they take on the private sector, or to work with us indefinitely.

We will become the Amazon of NGO work. Technological solutions to the UN Millenium Goals require an abundance of minds to work creatively on multidisciplinary approaches to social science to engineer contextualized responses to the world’s most pressing problems in the twenty first century. By using social capital to create human capital, we will be able to effectively translate concepts into financial capital returns which can be invested in growth. Unlike many for profit companies, the hybrid business model is extremely well suited to growth focus rather than profit because the operations of the nonprofit are already one hundred percent reinvested into the organization, and with the non-mission-critical aspects being taken up by the for-profit there is room for both profit and growth, and because much of the assets are intangible, the for-profit sub-entity does not need to sacrifice much in order to bolster the mission of the organization.