Down to the Wire

by Gale Wiley

Thursday at 10:45 p.m. 20 Rice MBAs take off on a 10,000 mile journey to Kigali, Rwanda -- the heart of Africa -- where they will meet up with their professor, Marc Epstein.

Epstein and his students plan to help Rwandan entrepreneurs launch businesses using products developed and tested by Rice engineering students.

Lauren Vesteweg, executive director of Rice 360, and I (serving as cameraman) are accompanying the students.

We fly from Houston to London to Nairobi to Kigali.



Here's what the Houston Business Journal reported about the project:

Rice students apply business skills in Rwanda
Houston Business Journal

A group of Rice University graduate students will spend spring break away from the beach.

This week, 20 students from the university’s Graduate School of Management will depart for Rwanda to apply their business skills in a developing country.

Students will help Rwandan entrepreneurs make a living in a country where most live on about $1 per day, said Marc Epstein, a Rice professor of management.

“About 10 percent of the world’s population live in North America and Western Europe,” he said. “That’s the tip of the economic pyramid, and growth there is flat. The companies our students will eventually be working for are well aware that the growth in the next few decades is at the bottom of the pyramid, where the other 90 percent live.”

Four Teams The MBA students will be divided into four five-person teams and tasked with developing a viable business plan for a specific product in just four months.

The students are developing business plans for three prototype products that were tested in African clinics and hospitals last summer by undergraduate interns that were part of Rice’s Beyond Traditional Borders program.

The teams are organized by product -- the low-cost neonatal incubator team (center), a diagnostic lab-in-a-backpack team (lower left) and a plastic dosing device for liquid medicines team (lower right). [At the top of the page is the protein packet team.]





Epstein said there’s no way to know how good the ideas are until the students arrive in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali.

Once on the ground, the students will gather information from potential customers, producers, suppliers and distributors and meet with government and business leaders.

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