Key Presentation Skills Learned from the Hult Prize

By Ingrid Cazalis, Global MBA 2013-2014, France

The Hult Prize was an amazing competition that I recommend not only for MBA students, but for all ESSEC students. It is open to all and a single school can present a team in all six regional finals. The experience of working in a team to create a social enterprise was a real challenge, not only for the group but on an individual level. Since my group members have already written about their experiences, as team captain I would like to take the liberty to offer some advice for future Hult prize competitors.

1/ Sign up in November and take the challenge! By November you will have three months to get to know your classmates, so be sure to pick a team with whom you can work well. You’ll spend over 100 hours working together! It’s also important to find the right balance between extroverts vs. introverts, creative vs. cerebral, etc.

2/ What you write in your first essay, for the initial selection among 10,000 applicants, can be different from the project you will finally create. We lost quite some time struggling on this part.

3/ Everything is in the storytelling. This is true for Hult, but for any presentation as well. How do you want to capture the audience? How do you create a connection? We created our own character, Maria, whose story we followed during our 12 minute speech.

4/ On that note, 12 minutes is really short. We recommend making 6-8 slides and speaking only 7-8 minutes in order to leave 4 minutes for questions. It’s key to leave time for the jury to ask questions, because they will support you if you make it to the second round.

5/ Don’t forget to present yourself; not just “we are from ESSEC Business School,” you have to find a creative approach to connect with the jury and present individually. It only takes 20 seconds, but it helps to give a good first impression. We personally decided to take a funny approach; Richard presented each of us with one adjective to describe our personality. I was lucky that mine changed from the “grumpy” leader to the “forceful” leader.

6/ As I mentioned, we are a team, so demonstrate it on stage. We saw too many teams with 1 speaker and 4-5 other members hiding behind the podium, not even smiling. There was no connection. Some people may advise you to have only 1 speaker, but we disagreed. One speaker is monotone and, after so many months of work, it is nice to get the chance to participate. If you decide to go with more than two speakers, make sure the transition is smooth. We got a super remote to click through our presentation so we could focus on the speech.

7/ Finally, some teams forgot to focus on the main subject. This year, the main question was clearly why you need USD $1 million and how you can reach 25 million people. Some teams did not answer these two questions and the jury asked them to stop on the first round before the end of the 12 minutes.

Our key advice for future Hult competitors, or for any other presentation situation: Storytelling, figures, and Power Point creativity. Keep it smart and simple.

The Day of the Hult Prize Regional Finals

By Naoki Kitabayashi, Global MBA 2013-2014, United States

The experience was surreal, and it’s still difficult to describe the emotions we felt as we competed for the Hult Prize at the regional final in Shanghai on March 8th. Our proposal was a culmination of over two months of research, meetings, and creative problem solving. Led by Ingrid Cazalis, the team had worked many hours and came to Shanghai determined to win.

We had taken an overnight flight from Singapore and landed on March 7th on a very cold morning. We checked into the rooms that we had booked, only two blocks away from the Hult Business School Shanghai Campus. We registered and met the organizers and the rest of the competing teams. Before dinner, we listened to two lectures. The first, by Dr. Helen Chen from L.E.K. Consulting, was on health care issues related to chronic diseases, more specifically on breast cancer. The second lecture was given by Eric Zwisler, President of Cardinal Health China. He spoke about his experience in China and advised the students on importance of ethics and teamwork.

On the day of the competition, we started the day with a breakfast at 7 am. Afterwards, we entered our assigned conference room and spent the next five hours fine-tuning the presentation. For the first presentation, all of the competing schools, about thirty, were broken up into four groups of about eight teams. Each team was given 12 minutes to make a pitch to a small panel of judges. Judges from each group then selected a winner to present again, but this time in front of all of the judges and competitors with the trip to Boston and the Hult Prize finalist spot on the line.

Our team, MobilHealth, was assigned to Group 2 and was given the 2:30 time slot to present. At 2:15, we were called to standby outside of the presentation room. We were relaxed even though just minutes before we were dancing around a small room in order to get our energy level up after a long morning.

“Fifteen minutes.”

“Two minutes.”

We were then called into a small classroom where six judges sat in the front row. We promptly started our presentation starting with the introduction of the team members by Richard. Claudia then told the story of Maria who lived in the slums of Jacarezinho in Brazil, and was in need of healthcare. I presented the core concept of the proposal, the concept of “one,” which would provide early diagnosis for $1, in 1 hour within 1 km of those at risk for developing chronic diseases. Then our team leader Ingrid presented the financial and logistical part of the proposal that have been worked out to fine details. It was a great team effort.

We were very content with the performance and felt like we gave all that we had. To be selected later as the winner of the group and be given the opportunity to present our ideas in front of everyone involved at the event was the cherry on top. Although we weren’t selected as the winner of the regional final, the experience was still very positive and memorable. I’m happy to have shared this unique experience with my teammates and hope that we were able to contribute good ideas to bringing forth a solution to the global healthcare problem in urban slums.

Mobile Health: The Concept of “One”

By Claudia Pumarejo, Global MBA 2013-2014, Mexico

It was the moment of the night. Helen Chen, from LEK Consulting had just called our name: “The winners of the second room - ESSEC Business School!” We had to present our idea for a social enterprise in front of over 200 people, 20 of them high profile judges from all walks of life. Only 4 teams out of 30 were selected. We celebrated for five seconds and rushed on stage without thinking too much about it. We did it, we got to the point we were aiming for.

You must be wondering what this idea was. It was the concept of “One.” Our plan was to offer early diagnosis of chronic diseases in urban slums within one hour, within one kilometer from the population at risk, and for only one dollar. Let me explain a bit more about how we planned to achieve this.

Thanks to a strong awareness program that would help us both to attract customers and to educate about prevention, we would enter the market hand in hand with the main stakeholders. We considered internal and external players such as local governments, NGOs, community and religious leaders, doctors and medical schools. In terms of physical resources, we would have vehicles (buses, mini vans, bikes, backpacks) equipped with accurate, easy-to-use diagnosis tools.

During the one hour visit, the first 15 minutes would be spent answering a free risk assessment questionnaire, based on lifestyle habits, body measurements and other criteria. After the first assessment, there would be a filter and a USD $1 fee to go to a deeper examination.

The project would be operated by the slum residents themselves. In terms of human resources, we would have one nurse, a driver assisting with administrative tasks, and four staff members carefully trained by our medical partners. We would give preference to heads of families, usually women, and patients suffering from chronic diseases in our recruitment process.

The challenge was to impact at least 25 million people in five years with our social enterprise. Thanks to a detailed financial and operational analysis, we were able to balance costs and revenues in order to be sustainable.

We chose one slum out of the hundreds surrounding Rio de Janeiro as our pilot and we gave it a face in the form of a woman living there, Maria Gonzales. She was developing diabetes, but she was unaware of it. People in the audience were able to relate to her as we discussed our understanding of the problem through the challenges she was facing.

We chose Brazil because we felt closer to the culture, because this year there is political will to improve the living conditions in the slums (due to the Olympics Games and the World Cup), because at least half of the team spoke Spanish (we planned to expand the project within Latin America), and finally, because if we had won, we would have gone to a start up accelerator in Boston (traveling within the Americas would be faster).

After working hard for three months, we are very proud and satisfied with our performance in Shanghai, and thrilled with all the people we met there.

 

Hult Prize: Reporting from Team Rene

By Rene Forjanic, Global MBA student 2013-2014, Slovenia

Contrary to popular belief, urban slums do have access to general healthcare and treatment, limited as the latter might be. There are number of healthcare providers, both NGOs and for-profit, that are providing affordable (often free) healthcare solutions tailored specifically to the needs of urban slum dwellers. Another group with great potential are community health workers – these “community champions” are very much seen as trustworthy and honest by the local population and can, with some additional training, act for example as mediators between slum residents and us.

The real issue that prevents the majority of residents in urban slums from obtaining adequate health care or treatment, however, is the lack of profitability of the various business models in place today. While the aforementioned “local champions” care for up to 100,000 patients per year, their operations – good as they may be – simply cannot be scaled up. Both the NGOs and community champions face the same problem: due to financial constraints, they are only able to provide quality service to a handful of patients (compared to the total slum population in need of medical assistance), while their expertise could be used to help so many more.

One solution is a two-tier project that makes use of both non-profit and for-profit business models. The real question for any type of endeavor, particularly social, is how to make it self-sustainable (profitable)? The model we are developing is a solution capable of diagnosing slum residents for some of the most widespread chronic diseases. Furthermore, at the core of our solution, there is the option to generate a patient’s medical chart to be used by healthcare professionals or to compile statistics for interested parties.

Since the priorities of urban slum residents are focused more on immediate survival needs, convincing them to get diagnosed for diseases that could impact their lives in the mid- to long-run, if at all, is a challenge in and of itself. To be completely honest, this is something we are still struggling with – how do we provide incentives to urban slum residents to get tested for diseases that might not even impact them? Do we dare ask hardworking men and women who are struggling for survival to pay for something so trivial?

Our idea for working around this barrier is to diagnose people when they are attending in one of their short-term needs. By designing our solution in a simple and flexible way, we may be able to offer added value in the form of increased service to the patients, perhaps even free of charge, and at the same time collaborate with other organizations. In any case, we’re still some time away from our presentation in Dubai and we are putting in every possible effort to make our solution as solid as possible. See you there!

Hult Prize 2014: Students speak out

Before heading to the regional finals in Shanghai, one of ESSEC's Hult Prize teams sat down to discuss why they're participating in the Hult Challenge and how their MBA studies help them to create a social enterprise addressing health problems in urban slums.

Hult Challenge: Creating a Social Entreprise

By Claudia Pumarejo, Global MBA 2013-2014, Mexico

“Access to health care should be a right, not a privilege.” – Bill Clinton

L-R: Richard Huynh, Naoki Kitabayashi
Ingrid Cazalis, Claudia Pumarejo

A Social Enterprise combines the tools used by governments, NGOs and the private sector to maximize human and environmental well-being, rather than maximizing profits for external shareholders. It is a way business-minded people – looking to create value – can put their skills and knowledge to the service of humanity.

The Hult Prize is a start-up accelerator for social entrepreneurship that originated at Hult International Business School. One of its students, Ahmad Ashkar, thought of “crowd-sourcing brilliant solutions for how to change the world from college and university students around the world”. The first Hult Prize challenge, gathering teams from business schools to take up the challenge of the global education crisis, took place in 2010.

It has been a long time since the French “Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen.” Nevertheless, these natural rights declared in 1789, such as equality and freedom, have not been achieved in every country in the world. Moreover, as the society has evolved and new human rights have emerged, some have been left behind. In 1979, Czech jurist Karel Vasak discussed a “third generation of human rights,” including the rights of economic and social development, communication, healthy environment and natural resources.

The Clinton Global Initiative is one of Hult International Business School’s partners in the challenge. As former US president Bill Clinton recalls: “Over the past four years, the Hult Prize has brought together some of the brightest young innovators to address the obstacles that prevent prosperity and opportunity from thriving worldwide. From increasing access to technology and clean water to tackling poverty and food security on a global level, past competitions have yielded tremendous ideas that support business and social enterprise while serving the greater good”. They are doing their part.

This year, the challenge will be “Improving Chronic Disease Care in Slums.” ESSEC, a business school deeply concerned with world issues and developing nations, will be represented by two teams at this year’s Hult Prize; our team going to Shanghai and our classmates going to Dubai for the Regional Finals. The teams selected in these and other locations (such as Boston, San Francisco, London and Sao Paulo) will then go to New York City for the big final, where the winning team will received USD 1 million in funding to bring their Social Enterprise to life.

Two ESSEC Teams Advance to Regional Finals of Fifth Annual Hult Prize

Top-tier schools go head-to-head in world’s largest student competition, competing for $1 million in start-up funding to solve President Clinton’s Healthcare Challenge

L-R: Samia Badji, Charles Haines
Rene Forjanic, Arnaud Fouquet
Sherry Wei Jiaying

Paris, France (13 January 2014) — The Hult Prize Foundation recently announced that two teams from ESSEC Business School have advanced to the regional finals of the Fifth annual Hult Prize. The Hult Prize is the world’s largest student competition and start-up platform for social good. In partnership with President Bill Clinton and the Clinton Global Initiative, the innovative crowdsourcing platform identifies and launches disruptive and catalytic social ventures that aim to solve the planet’s most pressing challenges. Student teams compete in six cities around the world for a chance to secure US$ 1 million in start-up funding to launch a sustainable social venture.

The team members are from the Global MBA and ESSEC’s PhD program. The first team includes Rene Forjanic (Slovenia), Charles Haines (UK), and Arnaud Fouquet (France) from the Global MBA, and Samia Badji (France) and Sherry Wei Jiaying (China) from the PhD program. The second team includes Ingrid Cazalis (France), Naoki Kitabayashi (USA), Claudia Pumarejo (Mexico), and Richard Huynh (France) from the Global MBA.

L-R: Richard Huynh, Naoki Kitabayashi
Ingrid Cazalis, Claudia Pumarejo

Rene Forjanic says, "Our teams are honored to be chosen to advance to the regional finals of the 2014 Hult Prize. In our hectic lives, we often forget how privileged we are. As MBA graduates, we strongly feel it is our duty to apply our studies and experience to give back to society for the opportunity we have had to thrive. As we move forward, we are motivated to excel by the knowledge that our projects are two among many entrepreneurial ideas to improve the healthcare and lives of the urban poor."

The 2014 Hult Prize will focus on the 250 million slum dwellers around the world suffering from chronic diseases who need help – a challenge personally selected by President Bill Clinton. Ahmad Ashkar, CEO and Founder of the Hult Prize, attributes the success of the competition to the shift in the global economy and the millennial generation’s refusal to live in a world with inequality, “We are giving entrepreneurs from around the world a platform to innovate and revolutionize the way we think about servicing the poor.”

Each team selected was chosen from more than 10,000 applications received from over 350 colleges and universities in over 150 countries. The Hult Prize regional competitions will take place on March 7 and 8, 2014 in Boston, San Francisco, London, Dubai, Shanghai and Sao Paulo. ESSEC’s teams will compete in Dubai and Shanghai.

Following the regional finals, one winning team from each host city will move into a summer business incubator, where participants will receive mentorship, advisory and strategic planning as they create prototypes and set-up to launch their new social business. A final round of competition will be hosted by the Clinton Global Initiative at its annual meeting in September, where CGI delegates will select a winning team, which will be awarded the US$ 1,000,000 Prize by President Bill Clinton himself. The President has said, “The Hult Prize is a wonderful example of the creative cooperation needed to build a world with shared opportunity, shared responsibility, and shared prosperity, and each year I look forward to seeing the many outstanding ideas the competition produces.”

About the Hult Prize
The Hult Prize is a start-up accelerator for social entrepreneurship, which brings together the brightest college and university students from around the globe to solve the world’s most pressing issues. The annual initiative is the world’s largest student competition and crowd-sourcing platform for social good. The Hult Prize has been funded by the Hult family since its inception in 2009. To learn more, visit www.hultprize.org.

About The Clinton Global Initiative
Established in 2005 by President Bill Clinton, the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), an initiative of Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, convenes global leaders to create and implement innovative solutions to the world’s most pressing challenges. CGI Annual Meetings have brought together more than 150 heads of state, 20 Nobel Prize laureates, and hundreds of leading CEOs, heads of foundations and NGOs, major philanthropists, and members of the media. To date, CGI members have made more than 2,500 commitments, which are already improving the lives of more than 430 million people in over 180 countries. When fully funded and implemented, these commitments will be valued at $87.9 billion.

About ESSEC Business School
ESSEC Business School is one of France’s top business schools and a European leader in management education. Since 1907, ESSEC has developed a unique learning model based on its core values of innovation, open-mindedness, responsibility and excellence. ESSEC offers a comprehensive range of programs, including undergraduate, graduate and executive education. Today the ESSEC community represents over 90 nationalities, 4,400 students, 5,000 managers in executive education, and 130 permanent faculty members, located on three campuses in Cergy-Pontoise, Paris La Défense and Singapore. Its network of 44,000 active alumni extends across 55 countries. ESSEC’s tailor-made approach to business education serves its mission of training ambitious and responsible leaders for tomorrow’s world.

Press Contacts
info@hultprize.org