After going through a lot of process, there are two social enterprise that got chosen as best case for Erasmus+ INSPIRE Social Enterprise Business Plan Competition from Universitas Sumatera Utara, the two best cases are IDEASTEAM and EcoGrow. Both teams were supervised by Mr. Trudly Karo-Karo as the owner of CV. Teknologi Tepat Guna which have a lot of incredible experience in business development. Both teams want to start their business because they want it to be valuable and impactful for their society or community.
Let’s have a look at the first team which is Ideasteam. Ideasteam begin their business idea to teach STEAM (Science Technology Engineering Arts and Math) for children. This idea came after lack of STEAM Specialist in Indonesia and the high demand of specialist at Industry 4.0. IdeaSTEAM implements play and learn technique with robotics so the student will play as long as they learn Science, Math, Technic and Robotic. They choose to teach children at the age 7-10 years old because in their age is the most crucial year for remembering and understanding everything. They also identify one of their local problems which are lack of jobs for the disabilities. They did research that most of disable peopledon’thaveproperjoborevenunemployed.Theirgoalforthissocialproblemistoempower and gain more interest in several types of disabled children so they could believe they have the same opportunity to learn STEAM through robotics. The advantages for disabled children are they have same chance to learn STEAM and after graduating from the program they could have a chance to become a mentor to teach other children. After doing several mentoring sessions, they said that it is not easy to developing social entrepreneurship. But, their mentor helps them to gain more knowledge at public relations, problem solving, and give them good examples based on his experience and that is really useful. In the next year, they want to at least collaborate with 3 schools in Medan City. By 5 year later, they could have their own working space to learn with other children. Our creative space become everyone destination for learning robotics especially for disabilities.
The second best case team goes to EcoGrow. Ecogrow begin their business idea because they want to turn waste into useful products and it could be benefit for low income families. They promote environment sustainable education through greater independence gained by produce eco-friendly organic liquid fertilizer (OLF). In this social business, they cooperate with Sekolah Alam Medan. Every day they could pick up 50 kg organic food waste form the market and 20 kg manure for making the organic liquid fertilizer (OLF). They sells their product through offline and online platform such as e-commerce (Shopee, Tokopedia, Lazada, Bukalapak and Blibli) for gaining profit or revenue. They said that their customer segmentations come from medium to high income market into householder and business that aware of using organic high nitrogen fertilizer. Since this is the first time they build social business, they said that they didn’t consider pandemic as one of the obstacles to develop their business. The pandemic Covid-19 makes them unable to communicate face to face with the community and customers which they can guide to educate them more about eco-friendly lifestyle. They have a vision that in the future they could have market spread and production scale up. They said the key factors for being success in social enterprise are quality of products, price, delivery service, prudent source and funding.
Congratulations for both teams for winning the best case Erasmus+ INSPIRE Social Enterprise Business Plan Competition. We do hope that both teams could achieve their vision as soon as possible and become the local heroes in their community because that is one of the objective for doing social enterprise. We also want to give our upmost gratitude for other team participation adn we do hope that you could gain experience for joining Erasmus+ INSPIRE Social Enterprise Business Plan Competition as you also join the incubation program and supervised by the incredible mentors. Once again, Congratulation!