The business of helping business

Students at Portland State are helping businesses examine the ways in which their practices can benefit more stakeholders than just shareholders.

Early this month, the School of Business Administration launched a new program called the Social Innovation Incubator to help upstart and established companies focus on innovations that benefit the environment and humanity.

“We just launched, and our members are already benefitting from strategic advice, contacts with potential funders and even press exposure,” said Cynthia Cooper, director of SII, who leads the program and also teaches in the graduate program within the SBA.

The services include one-on-one business consulting and mentoring, project assistance from MBA student teams and interns, peer-to-peer events and networking and educational workshops.

 “[We] focus on projects that have social and environmental benefits as primary objectives. There are business models, legal and funding implications for these types of companies and we provide specialized support,” Cooper said.

Since the launch, SII has been working with two charter companies, Sustainable Harvest and Preciva Incorporated.
Sustainable Harvest is already established as a Portland-based leader in sustainable coffee importing. They are launching two “intrapreneurial” projects—new initiatives within established businesses or organizations—with the help of SII. The first, to be launched in Oaxaca, Mexico, is a training center and coffee-roasting business that will benefit disadvantaged youth, low-income farming communities and the environment.

The second project is the development of a Web-based program to help farmer cooperatives more effectively track their business and coffee sales, empowering farmers to connect with buyers and to sell their coffee in higher-paying markets.
“We work to improve the lives of coffee farmers by providing higher incomes through improved market linkages, training and development services funded by company income and grants,” said Jacen Greene, finance and operations analyst for Sustainable Harvest.

“The SII provides invaluable support and consulting services for our own ‘intrapreneurship’ efforts, as we experiment with new approaches and programs outside our traditional business model,” he said. “Because the social and environmental values of the SII align perfectly with our own, we can rely on them as a trusted partner to help us evaluate new opportunities to benefit coffee farmers while protecting the environment.”

Preciva is a hybrid startup company specializing in developing electronic screening and diagnostic tests for cervical cancer that are more accessible and accurate.

 Preciva is still in the early stages—they don’t have a product on the market yet.

“One of our goals has been to develop this product using a business structure which would allow us to ensure that the test is ultimately available to the women who need it most—women in low income countries who have no access to affordable, accurate screening,” said Anaïs Tuepker, director of Preciva.

According to Tuepker, women in low-income countries constitute about 80 percent of the estimated 250,000 deaths from cervical cancer worldwide each year.

“These tests are designed to overcome the financial, geographical and cultural barriers that limit access in low income countries,” Cooper said.

She expects that Preciva’s products will offer advantages that will transform the practice of screening in high-income countries as well.

For both Sustainable Harvest and Preciva, their choice to work with SSI seems to have made a big improvement in their companies.

“We have a much better sense of what the business and investment landscape looks like. A group like SII helps show social entrepreneurs ‘how things are’ in the business world, but at the same time encourages them to keep working towards the vision of how they could be,” Tuepker said.

 “[It is] a business environment that is much more attuned to generating social good. Having a space to really explore new business ideas with informed people like Cindy Cooper is tremendous.”

Because of the highly customized nature of the program, SII has a fairly selective two-part evaluation process for accepting new companies into the program. The first phase is a simple proposal, and companies interested can get instructions by e-mailing the SBA or Cooper.

If the basic criteria are met through the proposal, the entrepreneur or business is invited to submit a full application. Then a team of three to five reviewers evaluate the application and if it’s accepted, business between the company and SII begins.