The Workshop: Business Curriculum

The goal of our group is that once we leave the area, the local people will be able to successfully sustain development of the devices they have learned to make. That is why in this portion of the workshop, we help raise the awareness of different marketing methods. We challenge the local people to question to who, what, and how they would market the technologies. For example, the technicians may be able to go to a neighboring village and demonstrate how a bicycle generator is more efficient than a diesel generator because multiple people in the village can use this device. Hopefully this would lead to the village seeking an outside donation or money from a relative, and the money earned from this would go toward building more devices. While this section of the workshop might be more difficult for those without a business background, we try to give them the most hands-on education possible by forcing them to come up with marketing ideas and then critiquing them. This way, they learn from their own good and bad ideas in the boardroom, and it is our hope that this translates to success in the real world.