HCAP Day 1

This is an exciting day.

First, we had an absolutely inspiring Keynote speaker Mr Matthew Lee. He's a great speaker. The opening speech on Social Entrepreneurship starts with an interesting definition, "purposeful individuals create new models that powerful institutions & actors choose to adopt (achieving the goal of social change). As compared to the model that we have in mind after the Prof Teo's sharing, the important three components comprising of 1. social mission 2. innovation 3. market orientation, I think that the one US follows definitely focuses more on the social change while we tend to give more attention to the component market orientation.

The examples given during the sharing is especially relevant too. From how big companies borrow the idea from 100 dollar notebook for kid project and created social impact, to how Sesame Street inspired the global TV network to develop TV programme for education purpose. The ideas are definitely very very refreshing for me, as I’ve never really considered the impact of Social Enterprise in terms of attracting big institutions to come in and support the related industries. In this way, the gap between haves and have-nots can be filled up in the capitalism way as the big players are convinced by the SEs there’s certain market value of a particular industry. There are so many more that I want to share based on the talk, glad that I’m doing the report on this opening speech as well so that more insights will be presented on that.

The next event is the panel discussion led by prof Ager. The panelists are students from Harvard Graduate School embarking on their own projects of making a social impact in one way or another. Some of the interesting points include, how culture becomes relevant when a developed country stepped into a 3rd world country and would like to start a project of addressing certain social problems. These are extremely relevant because the roots of the problems might be the governance, their social values or even certain religion practice that’s embedded in the culture, these are invisible hindrance that might cause complete failure of the project if they are not taken into considerations.

Lunch is at Quincy Market and then we started the Scavenger Hunt in Boston. The weather is lovely and we took tons of great shots as a group.

The State House visit was really educational. I did not know that the state plays such a big role in everyday life of the Americans. That’s the main difference in terms of the constituency of both Singapore and China as compared to States I guess.

The dinner @ Chinatown was hilarious. We sat with 3 Japanese delegates and start to talk to each other about our own culture. That was great fun.