Andrea Sreshta
A Chicago Booth entrepreneur introduces an innovative light source
At the intersection of public good and efficient capitalism, you'll find LuminAID.
It's a compact solar-powered light invented to help people in emergencies, but it's also racking up sales among campers and other outdoor adventurers.
Andrea Sreshta, a full-time MBA student at Chicago Booth, was a graduate student in architecture at Columbia University when a massive earthquake in Haiti jolted her and classmate Anna Stork into action.
They turned their class project into a humanitarian mission.
"She and I did some initial research and identified emergency lighting as an area that wasn't really addressed on the ground when something like the earthquake in Haiti happened," Sreshta said. "There were other priorities, including medical needs, food, water, shelter. But in the meantime you had all these people who were forced to move into tent cities at night and there was no lighting and people felt very unsafe and just couldn't function after dark."
Sreshta and Stork developed LuminAID, a stand-alone lighting system useful in struggling regions where governments ration electricity. LuminAID provides hours of lighting after dark for families to cook and gather food and water.
At Chicago Booth, Sreshta and Stork's idea won the 2012 Social New Venture Challenge (SNVC), a yearly competition co-organized by the Social Enterprise Initiative and the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation. SNVC helps students launch for-profit and nonprofit ventures that have a social impact mission and a model for sustainability. They tackle case studies, receive mentoring, and take classroom instruction to increase their products' chances of changing lives without hurting the bottom line.
"What's unique about SNVC is that it's a 10-week experience, not just a one-off competition," Sreshta said. "Tons of helpful professors, classmates, and it also provides a chance to take a step back and really work on your business plan and your pitch."
That paid off when LuminAID Labs team won the 2012 SNVC and the $25,000 first-place prize. That led to more competitions.
"The plan that we further developed while in the Social New Venture Challenge was kind of the one that we took with us to the types of competitions moving forward, so SNVC was very, very productive that way."
In April 2013, LuminAID won a $100,000 prize sponsored by the US Department of Energy at the Clean Energy Challenge. In addition, the innovative light source has started capturing the attention of campers, who prefer the lightweight, waterproof, diffused LEDs to bulky lanterns. But it's in disasters that LuminAID really shines.
In tent cities and refugee camps, "People rely on candles as a primary source of light, which is very dangerous when you're living in those kinds of conditions in which basically everything could catch fire," Sreshta said.
"To be able to provide a safer source of light has made a big difference in a lot of the situations."
Sreshta and company are figuring out two areas Booth stresses in social enterprise: measuring impact and reaching sustainability.
"Booth has been extremely valuable in helping me navigate that," she said. "The school is very practical about the challenges that entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs confront. The challenges of running a business are the same, but [with social ventures] there's the additional challenge of being mindful of both your bottom line and your social mission."