University of Michigan Students and the Social Impact Challenge
The Detroit Economic Growth Corporation recently announced the winners of a challenge hosted by the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business-the Social Impact Challenge.
The goal of the competition is to solve challenging real life problems in a competitive format.
The problem tackled by the winning team, quite simply was how to get more businesses into Detroit. While it is true that Detroit has been enjoying growth and improvement in this area over the past decade, any visitor to Detroit will know that there are still tremendous opportunities and challenges to operating a business there. Large areas of vacant storefronts, abandoned houses, lack of developed transportation infrastructure, low pedestrian volume as well as the economic challenges of owning and operating a business.
One of the biggest challenges for a startup or entrepreneur is leasing retail space.
The University of Michigan students, Team Upstart, presented novel ways to reduce the leasing costs and risk as well as a plan to provide extensive training and resources to the entrepreneurs to develop a small “pop-up” retail space.
The Center for Social Impact at the University of Michigan’s director, Matt Kelterborn states: ”
“We believe the best way to learn about delivering meaningful social impact is to actually work on the ground with community leaders on projects that will have a lasting impact.”
Congratulations to all who participated in the Social Impact Challenge-a great example of using your academic knowledge to solve real world problems, one of the important themes of our work here at Wide Open Research.
Questions for Discussion
- What is the purpose of the Social Impact Challenge at the University of Michigan
- What problem was Team Upstart trying to solve?
- How did Team Upstart “solve” this problem?
- What benefits would their solution offer the residents and consumers in Detroit?
- Why does Matt Kelterborn think it is so important that students “actually work with community leaders?”
- How could you incorporate a form of the “social impact challenge” at your school?
For a link to Greta Guest’s article at University of Michigan News, please click here.
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