The Social Innovation Solution Competition (SISC) started with more than twenty competitors and culminated in a showdown between two teams—but the finale didn’t exactly end as anticipated.
“We expected the judges to name the winner,” says BYU strategy junior Daniel Durrant. “But they said they couldn’t decide between the final two teams, so we had to do another head-to-head.”
The competition was fierce, but Durrant along with fellow strategy students Preston Alder and William Adams took home the first-place prize of $4,000.
The SISC, hosted by the Ballard Center, isn’t your average business case competition. Student teams from any major use their skills to help solve a real-time problem for a socially-minded organization.
This year’s partner was Fairtrasa, a global social enterprise that works to empower marginalized farmers in developing countries to escape poverty. The teams were challenged to find a way to help farmers grow their businesses and spread Fairtrasa’s reach.
The winning team hatched a plan to develop objective criteria for the company and change the business model to include both a for-profit and nonprofit branch. In this model, the nonprofit branch would focus on the social impact and receive government funding as well as donations to go to the farmers.
And they got to present their plan to the founder and CEO himself, Patrick Struebi.
“It was really neat,” Durrant says. “I felt like the ideas we were coming up with and the work we were putting in was actually going to someone who could make a difference.”
To learn more about the SISC, click here.
_
Writer: Alex Burch