We talked to a person on the board of the B-School's social venture fund and someone from the social venture club. It sounds like MBA students are looking for social venture plans to use for a business plan class (I think it's somewhat similar to our senior design) and it looked like there was some interest in using the lamp or some other M-HEAL project for that.
I also heard an interesting suggestion from another MBA student. He suggested that we liscence our design to microlenders. This increases the sustainability of M-HEAL since we'd be constantly bringing in revenue (assuming the lamp takes off). An entrepeneur in a developing countries could go to a microlender looking to start a business. The microlender could then suggest our surgical lamp, assuming the entrepeneur was in a good market for it. We create value for the microlender because our proven design decreases the risk in his investment. The business student also told us that many times selling a product at a minimal cost makes it more widely used because the owners have an active investment in it.
We didn't get as much useful feedback on the lamp design as we had hoped for. Because the conference was focused around venture capital, our design didn't line up with the stated goals of the pitch competition (since we aren't fundable through VC as a student group). Pretty much we were told that we had a good project and we should pursue startup funding via grants. I believe they also said that if we ever wanted to spin off into a for profit company, there are some social VCs in the valley who might fund us.
-Steve
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