Tomorrow Princeton students will be vying for tens of thousands of dollars in prize money at two different venues: the Class of ’76 Green Business Plan Competition and TigerLaunch 2010.
Em[Power], a plan to transform landfill waste in Karachi, Pakistan, into energy, is a finalist in both competitions. The plan grew out of a project in Gordon Bloom‘s fall course in social entrepreneurship. In the video above you can see the em[Power] presentation for Bloom’s class made by undergraduates Faaez Ul Haq, Dalia Nahol, Fahad Shams, Jacob Hiller, and Michael Smith.
Other business plans that germinated in Bloom’s class and are competition finalists are Itsera-Freedom by Design, an effort to raise women out of poverty by employing them to make handicrafts from local materials, and Sun Salute Technologies, featuring a solar panel innovation developed by freshman Eden Full.
Princeton’s Keller Center, which is a co-sponsor of both business plan competitions, has been a hotbed of social entrepreneurship of late. Ashoka founder Bill Drayton, considered the father of social entrepreneurship, gave a lecture in December to celebrate the inauguration of the Princeton Entrepreneurship Club‘s Social Entrepreneurship Initiative.
TigerLaunch’s award ceremony tomorrow features a keynote speech by Peter Kellner, the founder of Uhuru Capital Management, an investment firm designed to advance the field of social entrepreneurship.
John Danner, who last year held the Keller Center’s Dean’s Visiting Professorship in Entrepreneurship, will be one of the judges for the TigerLaunch competition. A lecture that Danner gave on social entrepreneurship while he was a visiting professor at Princeton can be viewed here.
UPDATE: The Daily Princetonian reports on the TigerLaunch winners here. For coverage of the Green Business Plan winners, visit the Princeton Environmental Institute‘s website.
