Business models

The first two days gave us a good vision of what social entrepreneurship is all about. As the third day begun we where highly motivated to get more information and knowledge about social entrepreneurship, and how to start working on your own business ideas.

We started the day listening to the inspiring doctor Simon Brown. The agenda of the day was going to be the business model canvas, how to use it and build a working business idea based on it. The whole time we are working in teams of five, with people from every country in each group. The education includes lots of short group tasks which so far has resulted in really good business ideas. Dr Brown inspired us to build up our courage to be creative:

“If you always do what you always done, you will always get what you always got.”

We also got in touch with the group roles based on Belbins modified group role questionnaire, which showed us what strengths we have within the group. We realized how important it is to have different roles within a group instead of all having the same.

Both on Wednesday and Thursday afternoon we got to listen to more real life social entrepreneurs presenting their own social enterprises. All of the enterprises presented, actually were totally different from each other, some of them unique. Most of them were really inspiring and the presentations always led to very intensive discussions. Sometimes we needed to finish the sessions even tough there were some questions left. One of the entrepreneurs actually were invited to come back next week to continue the discussion with us, cause of the interesting topic.

The evenings have been spent together with our international friends, learning about and comparing cultures. The atmosphere have been really relaxed and all of us get along really nicely although the people are different.

We are really looking forward to see what the following week will bring along.

Annika, Jenni & Ronja