Week 3: Bringing the puzzle pieces together

Week 3 is already over? Time was flying by already before but this week felt like a day. 

The week started with an interview with Amid, one of the mentors. He coaches the startups in communication, marketing and business strategy. After working with Maroc Telecom, he started working as a freelancer to support companies like MCISE with mentoring. He joined MCISE a year ago. Generally he meets the startups once a month for 2 hours. Last year, he supported 25 startups at MCISE. According to him their biggest challenge is the long-term vision and to think big. He is working as a mentor because he is challenged himself, he enjoys the contact with these young entrepreneurs and he loves their stories. Before he joined MCISE, he didn't know about social entrepreneurship at all, so he learned a lot from his first engagements. Finally, he left an advice for MCISE: he recommends to open up additional branches in Fès, Casablanca and especially Tangier as their are most of the international companies.

Again we had the chance to talk to two additional startups. Health Care Solutions Inc. provides trainings and workshops for doctors. The trainings provide soft skills but also some introduction into spiritual work. In addition, the entrepreneurs want to provide an app that helps to identify the health issue of a patient by asking questions like 'Does the left arm hurt?' etc. For them the biggest success is if there are more healthy people and less people dying due to wrong treatment.

The second startup was Verda terre that can be translated with green yard. They plant vegetables/fruits and make sure that everything grows well. For this, they provide a special soil that provides the plants what they need. Their service is provided for free to farmers. Afterwards, when the goods are sold, they get a share of 30 %. Success means for them to make Morocco green and get rid of deserts.

The rest of the week we were busy with working on our final presentation and leave behinds. The final presentation includes all our recommendations for the main programs Dare Inc., Dare Space and Tamkeen and MCISE overall. As we cannot convey all the context and all relationships with slides, we will also provide a comprehensive report that contains a lot of graphics to explain how and why we came to our conclusions. Furthermore, to allow MCISE to measure their impact on a regular basis, we created a new survey. The repetitive survey results can be evaluated with an Excel-based dashboard that compares the current numbers with the previous quarters to show the increase or decrease of their KPIs. It is really satisfying to see how everything comes together now. You can compare it to working on a puzzle. First, you collect all pieces based on their colors, then you try out several tiles to find the matching place and finally all of them come together and make up a beautiful picture. 

All of the above has to be finished until Wednesday when we have our presentation in front of our client. Looking forward to a productive 4th week.

Example Chart from MCISE dashboard with example data

Do you know about social entrepreneurship or do you want to know more about it? We learned that there is a free online course about it on openSAP, SAP's MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses) platform: 'Enabling Entrepreneurs to Shape a Better World'.

Check it out here. 

Finally, the last riddle weekend Riddle: To relax for the upcoming next week, we are going on another trip tomorrow. The city is also called the blue city because most of its houses are painted blue. What is the name of the city?

Stay tuned and enjoy the weekend!