Reference no: EM133148126

THE CASE

You are a 'social entrepreneur' with a keen eye for opportunity to 'do good' whilst achieving great profit.  You have identified the enormous problem to our environment of non-biodegradable plastic waste polluting our oceans and waterways thus damaging the sustainability of many fish species including several relied upon to feed the world's population.  Your social objective for the environment is to trawl up and remove as much of this plastic from the oceans and waterways as is possible.

Not only do you have a great social conscience, but you can also see a highly profitable way to pay for it.  You have used your entrepreneurial-alertness to notice under COVID that transport costs by sea and by land have greatly increased in recent times due in large part to a great shortage of wooden pallets used for bulk freight to be stacked upon for transit.  These pallets are traditionally made of wood and hundreds of thousands of these have been lost or broken across the world over time with the remainder being vastly too few to address the greatly increased requirement for national and international freightage in the emerging post-COVID world.  You note too that they are very expensive to our environment requiring the destruction of millions of trees to make the very many pallets now needed.

Your venture idea is to trawl the ocean where enormous amounts of plastic is doing most harm thus improving the environment by its removal.  Your venture will then breakdown that plastic to raw material for the manufacture of plastic pallets as shown as a prototype to investors.  These replacement pallets are proven to be extremely strong and will be far less breakable than the wooden predecessor ...and cheaper to manufacture in large quantities.

You've conducted the four feasibility analyses - operational, marketing, human resources, financial - as part of your venture proposal business plan for prospective investors (just like you did for own group venture this semester in assignment 2b).  

Early indications from presentations that you've given to media, environment authorities and prospective investors is very encouraging.  The media thinks you are 'a legend'.  Politicians want to be associated with you.  Government even wants to be a highly-visible financial supporter to the venture.  Further, investors see the opportunity to be seen doing great social good whilst creating great wealth.

Q2 Explain to your investor with reasoning specifically related to your venture how you have engaged and will continue to engage design thinking, prototype, lean startup and minimum viable product (MVP) principles and tools to create then bring your social entrepreneurship proposal to remove damaging plastic from the worlds waterways whilst profiting from recycling that plastic as pallets to in the international freight market.  You really are quite clever, aren't you?