Lame Icebreakers? Not At Ross Where Social Impact & Business Come Together

‘BUSINESS CAN BE A FORCE FOR POSITIVE CHANGE’

The Impact Challenge and MBA program at Ross has three main goals, according to DeRue. First, to create positive impact through business. Having Detroit in your backyard provides ample opportunity for local positive change.

Second, the challenge is designed to throw students into the deep-end. And finally, the program is essentially meant to be a weeklong, high-pressure icebreaker. Why describe what your best friend would say about you and play name game after name game when you can spend a week brainstorming, arguing, collaborating and pitching a business ideas with new classmates? Community develops rapidly under the circumstances, says DeRue.

Students echo the idea behind the challenge. “There is an emphasis on experiential-based and action-based learning (at Ross),” says first-year student Lily Hamburger. “The real-world applications and knowing we were impacting Detroit youth forced us to learn and grow quickly.”

Fellow student, Lucius Clay, added the challenge of creating a for-profit business geared towards positive social change was incredibly challenging and unique.

“In many ways, we want our students to avoid the idea that making a profit and being socially impactful are exclusive to a business,” says DeRue. “We ask our students to embrace the idea of businesses making money as a means to a positive end. The idea that business can be a force for positive change as well as economic or social prosperity. We try to create opportunities for them to wrestle with that tension.”

Wrestle, indeed. President and CEO Leslie Smith of TownTech Detroit, the nonprofit working with other Ross students to develop relationships and contacts in the Detroit neighborhoods leading up to the Impact Challenge, also emphasized the importance of American business embracing “socially impactful entrepreneurship.”

“It is an important departure to think socially impactful entrepreneurship does not make money or participate in the capitalist environment,” Smith says. “We can get tied up in thinking social entrepreneurship means charity. We are not trying to build another NGO or an organization only focused on making money. We are creating a productive shift to combine the social good while making money.”

The winning team.

EVERYONE WINS

Also new this year was the participation of all 1,500 Ross students, including those from the weekend and evening MBA, global MBA and master of management programs. All of them worked with TechTown to develop a lot of the background research leading up to the challenge. Bachelors of business administration students will take over the Kickstarter campaign and will work with TechTown throughout the year to fundraise and implement the program.

“The best part for us now is we have six developed plans from some insanely smart people,” says Smith. “We will most likely use those concepts in some way as well.”

DeRue said one of the greatest challenges from years past was the impact lasting longer than the week. That problem has been solved.

“The Ross mission is to create a positive change,” Hamburger says. “This was an opportunity for us to do something real. I learned a lot about business and creating a social enterprise this week.”

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