Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition (GSEC)

GSEC Submission Requirements and Rules

 Application Overview
 How To Apply
 Rules
 Executive Summary and Business Plan Submission Requirements

Application Overview

The GSEC application, review, and competition processes begin in early November 2010 and culminate at GSEC
Week, February 14-18, 2011 in Seattle, WA, USA. The program timeline is outlined below here and specific
requirements are detailed on the following pages.

Please carefully review the GSEC Rules and Submission Requirements below before submitting an application.
Contact the GSEC with any questions: gsec@uw.edu or 206.685.3432.

Step 1: Applications due November 4, 2010 (8 am Pacific Standard Time)

Step 2: Application reviews & semi-finalist team selection (Nov-December 2010)

GSEC applications go through two rounds of reviews between November-December 2010 to determine
the semi-finalist GSEC teams. Refer to the GSEC Schedule for a description of the program timeline and
GSEC Week.

Step 3: Semi-finalist teams confirmed & paired with mentors (Dec 31, 2010)
Semi-finalist teams are selected in mid-December and are invited to attend GSEC Week.
Once semi-finalist teams confirm participation, they are paired and work with mentors starting
December 2010 to develop the full business plan.

Step 4: Semi-finalist teams submit full business plan draft (Jan 13, 2011)
GSEC semi-finalist teams will be required to submit a full business plan on January 13, 2011, which is a
draft of the business plan that teams can modify before GSEC Week.

Step 5: Semi-finalist teams submit final business plan (Feb 3, 2011)

On February 3, 2011, semi-finalist teams will be required to submit a final business plan, which will be
forwarded to GSEC judges prior to the competition for review. Teams will not be able to modify the final
business plan.

Step 6: GSEC Week (Feb. 14-18, 2011)

Teams meet a diverse array of experts across sectors in Seattle as they visit regional companies, receive
feedback on their presentations, pitch their businesses to judges, compete for prizes, and meet with
potential investors.
Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition (GSEC)

How To Apply

To compete in GSEC, student teams need to create an innovative social business plan that seeks to alleviate a
problem of poverty in a developing economy. 1

GSEC business plans may focus on any subject, must quantify and clearly demonstrate the Social Return on
Investment (SROI), and provide a social impact assessment.

The full eligibility and competition requirements are detailed in the GSEC Rules, detailed below.

To apply to GSEC, student teams must complete both of the following by Thursday 11/04/2010, (8:00 AM
Pacific Standard Time):

Both the executive summary and the online registration must be received by the deadline. Please carefully review
the GSEC Rules and Submission Requirements below before submitting an application. One application per team.

1) Online application, available here

2) Email the executive summary of your team's business plan to gsec@uw.edu. The executive summary
must adhere to the GSEC Executive Summary Requirements detailed below.

1
Country classification based on the World Bank Country Lending Groups
Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition (GSEC)

GSEC Rules
GSEC is a world-class social venture competition for students around the world and across disciplines who seek
to harness the power of commercial strategies to reduce poverty and affect positive social change in developing
economies.

GSEC provides cross-cultural, transformational practical learning experiences for student participants to hone
their business skills, expand their networks, and access new resources. Through exposure to iconic global
companies, a vibrant international development sector, leading research institutions, GSEC Week provides
exclusive opportunities for semi-finalist teams to benefit from invaluable resources and expertise in the Seattle
region.

GSEC awards prizes totaling at least US $30,000 to the business ideas that demonstrate the most innovative
solutions to problems of poverty and the best integration of financial and social returns on investment. Refer to
the Prizes section below for more information.

The following sections detail GSEC participant and business plan eligibility. Please review carefully prior to
applying.

Participant eligibility
 GSEC is open to currently enrolled students at any academic institution of higher education worldwide.
o All GSEC team members must be enrolled and regularly attending classes at the time of GSEC application
through GSEC Week. Teams that accept the invitation to compete in GSEC Week as a semi-finalist team
will commit to participate in required GSEC Week activities and will be asked to verify student status. All
semi-finalist team members must attend all required events, per the GSEC Week schedule and non-
compliant team members risk disqualification.
o Multidisciplinary teams highly encouraged. Post an announcement for a team or team member on the
GSEC Facebook discussion board.
o Teams may have non-student team members such as advisors and observers. Non-student team
members may attend GSEC Week events but may not present at any GSEC competition activity. All non-
student team members attending GSEC Week will be charged a flat fee to participate and will be
responsible for their own travel and accommodation expenses.
o All semi-finalist teams are responsible for the arrangements and expenses of travel and accommodations
to participate in GSEC Week. Partial travel scholarships may be available for semi-finalist teams from
developing economies.
 Only eligible student team members are able to earn GSEC monetary awards. No payments will be made to
non-students.
 The maximum number of team members allowed to participate in GSEC Week is four. GSEC teams typically
consist of 2-4 students; an individual is eligible to compete as a “team”.
 There is no limit of number of applications per country or academic institution. However, in addition to the
three GSEC judging criteria, GSEC applications are evaluated in terms of geographic and business sector
diversity. See business plan eligibility below for additional evaluation details.
 Teams may participate in other competitions. Teams or team members may reapply to GSEC each year
provided the business plan submitted is different.

Eligibility continued on next page

Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition (GSEC)

GSEC business plan eligibility

GSEC fosters the development of transformational and innovative student-generated business models that
achieve poverty alleviation and empowerment of the poor.
 GSEC business plans may focus on any subject area/industry and must apply to low income, lower middle
income, or upper middle income economies. 2
 GSEC business plans must quantify and clearly demonstrate the Social Return on Investment (SROI) and
provide a social impact assessment. In addition to the double (social) bottom line, GSEC plans may
demonstrate a triple (environmental) bottom-line.
 GSEC business plans are evaluated on three criteria: (1) effect on the quality of life and poverty alleviation in
one or more developing economies; (2) financial sustainability; (3) feasibility of implementation.
o GSEC business plans must show they will generate revenue, clearly explain revenue sources, and
demonstrate long-term financial sustainability. Businesses cannot have significant long-term reliance on
donations or government funding.
 GSEC business ideas must be the original idea of the GSEC applicant. Plagiarism/copyright/intellectual
property right violations will not be tolerated.
 GSEC business plans must be new, student-generated businesses that demonstrate innovative thinking or
approaches. Students must be the primary decision makers for the business and have an ownership stake or
potential for equity in the business.
 Existing businesses are acceptable if they do not have outside private financing or annual/cumulative sales
revenue.
 One business plan per team. The same business plan may not be resubmitted in GSEC.

Note: The Global Business Center at the UW Foster School of Business reserves the right to make the final
determination of the eligibility of submitted business plans. If you have questions about your eligibility, contact
gsec@uw.edu .

2
Country classification based on the World Bank Country Lending Groups
Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition (GSEC)

Prizes
In the spirit of fostering innovative business solutions to problems of poverty, GSEC prizes are awarded to
business plans that meet the GSEC judging criteria and demonstrate the best integration of financial and social
returns on investment.

Prizes include one Grand Prize, one Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Prize, and two Global
Health Prizes. Prize amounts are detailed on the GSEC Rules & Prizes webpage. The ICT and Global health prizes
are detailed in the following sections. All prizes are mutually exclusive.

GSEC Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Prize

GSEC seeks to highlight business plans that harness the benefits of ICTs to improve the human condition. As
such, a special award will be offered to the GSEC business idea that demonstrates the most innovative use of
ICTs to further poverty alleviation in developing economies. Examples include but are by no means limited to
mobile telephony, cloud computing, and social media.

ICT plan eligibility:

For the purposes of the competition, "innovative" means one of the following:
1. Technological innovation specifically addressing the quality of life for the poor;
2. New or innovative use of an existing technology that exceeds previous or current solutions;
3. Business idea that serves as a model or best practice for applying technology or has the potential to be scaled.

Prizes continued on next page

Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition (GSEC)

Prizes (continued)

GSEC Global Health Prize

SROI includes the social good of improved health. As such, a global health prize will be offered to the GSEC
business plan that alleviates health disparities, improves the health of the poor, and promotes the capacity of a
community to deal with health problems.

The GSEC global health prize will award the most innovative and transformational business solutions that
address diseases and health conditions with significant impact on poor people in developing countries. Eligible
business plans must adhere to the general GSEC judging criteria, have global health as the primary focus, and
meet the specific global health prize criteria below. Interdisciplinary teams are strongly encouraged.

Global Health plan eligibility:

 Plan must directly address a health problem;
 Plan must clearly outline the benefit to the health of the target population;
 Plan must include quantitative measures to estimate health impact such as reduction in disease
incidence or prevalence, disability adjusted life-years (DALYs) or mortality, and may use qualitative
measurement to describe this impact;
 Plan must present economic analyses of estimated cost-effectiveness or cost benefit;
 Plan must outline and clearly demonstrate accepted measures for health in the SROI analysis (for
example: generally accepted numbers for quality of life measurement, health outcomes, mortality
and productive years of life as published by established health research organizations);
 Examples of eligible topics plans may address include:
o Innovative technologies for prevention and/or care of infectious (e.g.: malaria, TB, HIV and
other sexually transmitted infections, pneumonia; diarrheal diseases) or chronic (eg:
hypertension and other cardiovascular diseases, tobacco-related disease, cancer) diseases;
maternal, neonatal, and child health; family planning; nutrition; unintentional and intentional
injuries (eg: road traffic injuries, burns, drowning, domestic violence);
o Health systems innovations to expand access to preventive and/or curative services for these
health problems;
o Basic public health service-related innovations (e.g. water quality improvement, sanitation);
 Examples of non-eligible ventures with secondary health impacts: rural electrification; "green"
industries; distance education for literacy.

In addition to the general GSEC judging criteria, the following factors alone or in combination will be considered
as we evaluate global health plans. They do not all have to be present in any single plan:
 Magnitude and severity of disease burden in target population;
 Significant and measurable reduction in health disparities among people in low or middle income
countries;
 Provision of an unmet need due to market forces that prevent near-term large financial returns, e.g.
certain vaccine development and distribution.
Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition (GSEC)

Confidentiality and Intellectual Property Guidelines

The authors of the business plan will retain all rights to the plan regarding its use at all times prior to and
following the competition except as stated below.

During the course of the competition, from application to GSEC Week, the judges, mentors, reviewers, and staff
that have some exposure to the GSEC business ideas are requested to keep the information confidential.
However, due to the nature of the competition, the GSEC organizers will not ask judges, reviewers, staff or the
audience to agree to or sign non-disclosure statements. If a team has concerns about the intellectual property
(IP) of their business idea, they are responsible for taking measures to protect the IP of their business plan.

All public sessions of GSEC, including but not limited to oral presentations and question/answer sessions, are
open to the public at large. Any and all of these public sessions may be broadcast to interested persons through
media which may include radio, television and the Internet. Any data or information discussed or divulged in
public sessions by entrants should be considered information that will likely enter the public realm, and entrants
should not assume any right of confidentiality in any data or information discussed, divulged or presented in
these sessions.

The organizers of the GSEC may make photocopies, photographs, videotapes and/or audiotapes of the
presentations including the business plan and other documents, charts or material prepared for use in
presentation at the GSEC. Students retain all proprietary rights.

GSEC may use the materials in any book or other printed materials and any videotape or other medium that it
may produce, provided that any profit earned from the sale of such items is used by GSEC to defray the costs of
future Competitions.

The GSEC organizers have non-exclusive world rights in all languages, and in all media, to use or to publish the
materials in any book, other printed materials, videotapes or other medium, and to use the materials in future
editions thereof and derivative products.

Any team with concerns regarding intellectual property, copyright, or patent confidentiality is strongly
encouraged to either contact their University’s intellectual property office (for University-developed discoveries)
or competent legal counsel (for non-University related discoveries). The University of Washington, the Global
Business Center, the Foster School of Business, and the organizers of the competition are not responsible for
any proprietary information and/or intellectual property included in a submitted business plan.

Contact gsec@uw.edu with questions.

Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition (GSEC)

GSEC Submission Requirements

The following sections detail the submission requirements for applications, which consist of a 5-page executive
summary, and semi-finalist teams’ business plans.

GSEC Application Executive Summary Requirements

Since the executive summary sent for the GSEC application is the only document detailing the team’s business
idea for the first two rounds of reviews, it should is longer than a traditional executive summary. (The executive
summary that semi-finalist teams will submit with their complete business plan should be approximately 1-2
pages). All GSEC submissions are sent via email to gsec@uw.edu.

Format
 Font/size: 12-point Arial or 11-point Verdana
 Length: 5 pages maximum, single-spaced, exclusive of title/cover page and table of contents. 3 pages of
supplementary materials allowed (such as graphs, charts, appendices).
 Document size & type: 1MB maximum; Microsoft Word or PDF format
o Submissions should be titled in following manner: TeamName_GSEC2010_ES
o All files must be merged – GSEC staff will not merge any files if sent separately
 Document page size: 8 ½ x 11 inches. No A4 size document formatting.
 Layout: Cover page with business plan/team name and names of team members; Table of contents
noting any supplementary materials. Pages must be numbered.

Content (minimum requirements)

 Business Overview
o Company description and business model
o Financial and social value proposition (environmental if applicable)
o Vision
o Strategy statement: who, what, where, why, how
o Current status
 The Market Opportunity
o How is this plan innovative? What problem does the company's product/service solve?
o Competitive analysis
 Market Solution
o Product(s) or service(s)
o How will this plan solve the problem
o Ability to create barriers to entry
 The Market
o Target customer(s)
o Industry analysis and forecast (Comparative Analysis)
 Management Team
o Founders, key management, industry experience, education
o Board of advisors and Board of directors (optional)
 Financial and Social Impact Summary (and environmental if applicable)
o Narrative overview of financial summary, financial model with basic projections
o Assumptions, capital requirements, basic projections, outcome measurements
o Narrative overview and framework to assess social impact
Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition (GSEC)

GSEC Business Plan Requirements

From the applicant pool, semi-finalist teams will be selected in December 2010 and invited to participate in
GSEC Week 2011 at the University of Washington in Seattle, WA. All semi-finalists will be required to submit a
full business plan.

All semi-finalist teams will be required to submit the following in order to participate in GSEC Week:
1) Business plan (one per team; detailed below). Submission deadlines detailed on the GSEC Schedule;
2) Resume booklet;
3) Online team member registration (one per team member).
Resume and registration information will be provided by the GSEC staff upon the team’s acceptance of
the invitation to participate in GSEC Week.

Business Plan Format (required):

 Document font, type, and page size: same as Executive Summary requirements (above)
 Document name: Submissions should be titled in following manner: TeamName_GSEC2010_bplan
 Document size: 4MB maximum
 Layout: Title/cover page, one-page executive summary, and page numbers are required. Table of
contents and supplementary materials are optional.
 Length: 15- 20 pages, maximum, exclusive of title/cover page and table of contents. 10 pages of
supplementary materials are allowed (such graphs, charts, appendices).

Business Plan Content (minimum requirements):

Executive Summary (1-2 pages)
 Business Overview & social mission
 Market opportunity, solution, and market analysis
 Competitive analysis
 Estimated year of break-even profitability
 Estimated revenues and net income (three years)
 Financial and Social Impact Summary
 Funding requirements

Business Overview
 Company description and business model
 Value proposition- financial and social; environmental if applicable
 Vision
 Strategy statement: how, what, who, where, why
 The social impact/transformation on people’s lives the business will make
 Current status, current or committed funding and all funding sources

Market Opportunity
 How is this plan innovative? What problem does the company's product/service solve?
 Define the problem, describe the need
 Competitive analysis (how the problem is not being solved by competitors)

Market solution
 Product or service
 Description of a working model or prototype, if applicable
Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition (GSEC)

 How you will address the need and solve the problem: What problem does the company's
product/service solve? How significant a problem is it?
 Ability to create barriers to entry

The Market
 Identification of customer(s) , target market
 Market size, analysis and forecast; industry analysis and forecast
 Geo-political, social and economic factors influencing your ability to serve your client group

Marketing and sales strategy

 Overall strategy
 Pricing policy
 Intellectual property strategy: What intellectual property exists and can it be protected?

Management team
 Who is involved and what is their experience?
 Founders and key management
 Industry experience, education
 Board of advisors (Critical-- it can augment team experience if needed)
 Optional: Board of directors
 A statement describing level of involvement of MBA student

Financial projections
 Sources and uses of capital, and projected revenues and expenses
 Detailed financial data should be displayed in spreadsheet form as an appendix. Financial data should
include a cash flow statement, income statement, and balance sheet.
 Outline overall financial model with detailed projections through Year 3 including pro forma cash flow
and budget analysis
 Other analysis, as appropriate (i.e. break even analysis)
 Discuss assumptions and capital requirements

Social / environmental Impact analysis

 Definition of your Social Value Proposition (i.e., Theory of Change)
 Quantification of your top three Social Indicators (e.g., Social Impact Value Chain)
 Monetization of your social impact (i.e., Social Return on Investment)
 Discuss key assumptions throughout the analysis*
 Discuss your potential negative social or environmental impact, if any
 Discuss, where applicable, how you are addressing each of the following areas within your business:
economic development, community involvement, environmental practices, governance, hiring and
workplace practices, sourcing/supply chain
 Other considerations (e.g., analysis of stakeholder needs, qualitative or anecdotal social impact data)
*The social impact should demonstrate how your venture provides beyond the status quo
Funding request and offering to investors
 Required investment
 Use of investment funding
 Structure of investment deal (e.g., stock, debentures, etc), and possible exit strategies