Rising Interest In Social Impact At Ross

Ross MBA student Mary Rockas also choose to do a MAP project with a social mission. Learn more about Ross social impact

Mary Rockas. Courtesy photo.

‘BUSINESS SOLUTIONS CAN SOMETIMES HAVE MORE LASTING IMPACTS’

Similarly, MBA student Mary Rockas also choose to do a MAP project with a social mission. Her team consulted for the Lulama project, associated with Imperial Health Sciences. The project seeks to provide financing to community pharmacies in South Africa to increase access to essential and non-essential medicines.

“This is a really exciting way to increase access and quality because it works to help stabilize and improve the entire pharmaceutical market in South Africa,” she says. “We acted as external consults and analyzed the current Lulama pilot program.”

Rockas and her team did onsite interviews and tours to get an idea of the issues pharmacists have to face, and realized that pharmacists are often on the forefront of providing community care in South Africa, as many customers will ask them for advice before going to an expensive health clinic.

As external consultants, Rockas says this project was an opportunity to evaluate a business comprehensively. The team looked at everything from stock-management systems to incentive systems, to training, to pharmacy selection, to market analysis.

“Social impact really does have a wide application,” she says. “What this project taught me is how business solutions can sometimes have more lasting impacts that one-off projects.”

‘IT’S MORE IMPORTANT THAN INCREASING THEIR MARGIN’

Ross MBA student Parker Caldwell found his social impact MAP project a little differently. Learn more about Ross social impact

Parker Caldwell. Courtesy photo.

MBA student Parker Caldwell found his social impact MAP project a little differently. He hadn’t been specifically looking for something with a social mission. “A month or two before we started, every student got a list of all the possible projects. There were about 200 or 300 options. I was working in insurance before, and am looking to move into the technology sector, and this project stood out to be because it had that, and a social nature.”

His team went to Pune, a large city in western India, to work for a medical device company called Jeevtronics. “They’re a private company, but they have a strong social mission,” Caldwell says. “They prioritize their social mission over the financial aspects of the company, and that was something I hadn’t worked with before.”

Caldwell says the company’s mission actually made their project a lot more complicated. The company is a startup, run out of the homes of the three founders. They have built an affordable defibrillator that can be hand cranked to run without electricity. A defibrillator is the device that can restart a heart after cardiac arrest – and the founders are hoping it can improve health care access in rural areas in India, where some towns don’t have electricity.

“Our business problem was addressing two things for the company – a go to market strategy focused on distribution, and a market sizing effort,” Caldwell says. “So they wanted to understand the size of the market, and how it might grow based on product and pricing.”

Social impact is growing at Ross. Learn more about Ross social impact

Parker Caldwell and MAP team in India. Courtesy photo.

In the end, Caldwell says part of their go to market recommendation was about price – to charge more than the bare minimum. “They’re planning to price it much lower than the current market price. It was a struggle for us to come up with a recommendation, and then a struggle to convince the founders,” he says. “They really want to make this as widely available as possible, but we think if they price it higher than the absolute minimum, it’ll increase their capital and make it easier to scale more quickly.”

Caldwell says he was humbled and inspired by the company and the founders, who he says could probably be making a lot more money doing something else. “They’ve decided they can actually make the world a much better place, and that it’s more important than increasing their margin by 15% or so,” he says. “It’s an experience I’ll remember for a long time, and it’ll serve as a valuable reminder to keep multiple stakeholders in mind when making business decisions.”

DON’T MISS BEST & BRIGHTEST MBAS: CLASS OF 2017 OR WAITLISTED AT FIVE SCHOOLS. THEN, FINALLY, A ‘YES’

Questions about this article? Email us or leave a comment below.