China’s mobile and online platform Alipay and the National University of Singapore (NUS) today announced the launch of a new initiative to provide support to drive social enterprise entrepreneurship across Southeast Asia.
The Alipay-NUS Enterprise Social Innovation Challenge will be held in Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Passionate entrepreneurs who believe in using digital technology to create a positive and sustainable impact in the 3 countries are encouraged to apply. Applications are now open and will close in Jan 2019. Top 3 winners of each country will be awarded S$10,000 and they will compete to win the grand prize of S$50,000 in the grand finale in Singapore in March 2019.
“We look forward to working with our new partner NUS Enterprise, to identify and support the growth of the most innovative start-ups in Southeast Asia. It is exciting for us to be involved with teams creating lasting impact for their communities and addressing real-world problems, such as ageing, poverty and lack of access to development opportunities,” said Geoff JIANG, Vice President, general manager of Technology and Business Innovation Group at Ant Financial, hinting of Ant Financial’s commitment to building the tech ecosystem in the region.
During the event, the list of invited panellists also shared about their social enterprise startup journey, as well as some of the challenges they face in their endeavours to make a significant social impact for the community.
Julian Koo, the co-founder of Jaga-me – an on-demand healthcare platform, shared about how an effective sales pitch framing can help a social enterprise handle the often conflicting dilemma between generating sustainable revenue and achieving a positive social impact when making attempts to fundraise. A clear revenue model; identifying where the margins come from and addressing the question of the ability to scale are some factors he mentioned that would be important to improve one’s sales pitch. That, in essence, isn’t any different from say food delivery as opposed to developing a solution for the food relief problem.
Mr Geoff Jiang, Vice President at Ant Financial, couldn’t agree more. He further elaborated on the 3 key questions that a fundraising pitch must seek to answer. They are 1) What is the customer value that this solution brings? 2) Is the team committed? 3) How deep is the technology that’s used to bring the solution?
And these will be the factors to be considered to select the winner of the social innovation challenge.
For application, please visit the site here.