Columbia Business School students Marcos Lara '04 and Guillermo Albizuri '06 took second place this year at the Global Social Venture Competition (GSVC), winning $10,000 to help make Connect US, their socially minded business venture, a reality. This year's competition was particularly fierce, with close to 100 ventures vying for one of the nine coveted finalist spots.

The Global Social Venture Competition began in 1999 as a student-led initiative at the Haas School of Business. In May 2001, Columbia Business School and The Goldman Sachs Foundation partnered with Haas to extend the reach of the competition and to help grow a national platform for social ventures; London Business School joined the competition in June 2003. This unprecedented partnership brings together the academic and financial worlds to support the creation of social ventures. Each year, entrant teams from around the world compete for over $45,000 in cash and travel prizes.

GSVC is unique among business plan competitions, giving equal weight to the venture's financial sustainability and to its social impact. Connect US aims to minimize the $100 to $300 billion social and financial burden of patient non-compliance in the U.S. Healthcare system. Its strategy is simple: provide the pharmaceutical industry with value-added wireless messaging solutions to remind patients to take medication as prescribed by their physicians (the main cause of non-compliance is forgetfulness). Reminders will be created at the prescription's point of sale at no cost to the patient, and messages will be broadcast in real time during the patient's treatment. These reminders will also educate the patient about the drug's benefits and side effects.

Marcos Lara, President and COO of Connect US, aspires to create an entirely new market: Interactive Business-to-Patient (B2P) communications. The team hopes that Connect US will become the leading international provider of low cost, personalized and highly interactive B2P solutions for the healthcare value chain.

The Connect US management team (pictured from left) includes: Raul Rodriguez (PhD, Columbia University, electrical engineering), Guillermo Albizuri '06, Marcos Lara '04, Alberto Lopez (PhD, Columbia University, electrical engineering) and Miguel Lara (an investment banker).

Each year the GSVC Final Event alternates between the three GSVC partnering schools and provides GSVC organizers with an opportunity to collaborate with one another to make improvements to the competition, as well as to network with professionals from all over the world. "Observing GSVC judges debate the merits of business plans was an eye-opening experience," said Jon Daigle '06, "and thanks to Cathy Clark's Social Entrepreneurship course, I was better able to understand how they were evaluating the social impact assessment component as well as financial viability."

In addition to Connect US, GSVC awarded the following prizes at this year's final event:

First Place ($25,000): World of Good (UC Berkeley, Haas School of Business) distributes a line of globally sourced fair trade gifts and accessories under fair trade guidelines that generate employment for women and disadvantaged communities, promise a living wage, and promote social and economic development.

Third Place ($5,000): Fuelture (University of Pennsylvania, Wharton School, and London Business School) will support converting high-mileage urban vehicles (especially taxis and small delivery vans) to automotive propane or liquefied petroleum gas (LPG) instead of gasoline, which would reduce running costs and improve urban air quality. Fuelture would simplify the conversion process and create a chain of filling stations.

Honorable mentions went to Fuerza Research (Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management) and MicroCredit Enterprises (UC Berkeley, Haas School of Business and UC Davis, Graduate School of Management).

The Social Impact Assessment Prize ($5,000) was awarded to Human Service Fellowship (Northwestern, Kellogg School of Management) for its plan to facilitate the hiring of skilled health workers by HIV/AIDS organizations in Sub-Saharan Africa. The honorable mention for this prize went to World of Good.

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