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next up we have yvonne english to talk for 15 minutes about innovating amidst uncertainty professor english has started many companies including an alternative energy project in texas called re-energy and an online retailer of accessories made from upcycled materials called salvagist to name just a couple she also founded a business incubator and serves as the executive director of the award-winning center for entrepreneurship and innovation at grove city college please enjoy this session with yvonne english and also see our second poll question now live under the video greetings from pittsburgh pennsylvania my name is yvonne english and i'm thrilled and honored to be a part of business matters 2021 i just want to take a quick moment to thank the good people at the acton institute for putting this event together and for their continued good work in the world in case you haven't heard from the commercials social media ads and memes apparently we are living in unprecedented times i don't know about you but i could certainly go for some precedented times about now we've had a global pandemic political chaos civil unrest and market upheaval and that was just january it's a time of adversity risk stress and chaos for those of you who love predictability and order i'm sure that this is a nightmare for my entrepreneurs in the audience this probably just sounds like a regular tuesday all kidding aside entrepreneurship represents a microcosm of today's climate entrepreneurs often experience versions of adversity risk stress and chaos while being required to innovate and stay relevant in order to keep their businesses alive i have been an entrepreneur several times over i've had the pleasure of coaching and mentoring scores of entrepreneurs a journey that has taken me from an incubator that i founded in rural pennsylvania to the bustling excitement of mentoring international teams in italy for the european innovation academy to my current role empowering and equipping next generation redemptive entrepreneurs through our nationally recognized program at grove city college through these experiences i have learned that the most innovative entrepreneurs share a core set of traits traits that can serve as guideposts for others during these chaotic times whether you're a student an entrepreneur a business leader or just someone who's seeking purpose in this time of uncertainty i hope that our time together brings you hope inspiration and the courage to take action our first lesson is this innovative entrepreneurs solve real problems actress singer songwriter caitlin crosby was on tour in new york when she found herself in need of a convenient place to keep her hotel key yes for my younger friends in the audience some hotels actually used to give you real keys she put the key on a chain around her neck and received a ton of compliments for her fashion sense from this experience she got the idea to take old used keys and engrave inspirational words on them she would then turn them into necklaces she started selling them on to her and even giving them away to people she met along the way that were struggling she called it the giving keys and imagined a pay it forward model where people would buy the keys with specific words such as faith strength and love the buyer would wear the key until they met someone who needed that specific inspiration then they would give the person that key in order to inspire them and help them in their journey in life it worked better than caitlyn imagined people started sharing their pay it forward stories with the company and one another and while this is already a great story caitlyn knew that she wanted the company to be more to do more so as any good innovator does caitlyn kept her eyes open looking for inspiration and opportunity within a few months she met rob and sarah they were sitting on a hollywood boulevard under an umbrella on a rainy day they had a simple sign that read ugly broke and hungry caitlyn took them to dinner and found out that sarah made jewelry as caitlyn tells the story she invited them to be her business partners right there and they started making giving keys the very next day after a while the couple saved up to get a hotel room then an apartment and eventually they even bought their own home the giving keys created an innovative business model to help others who are affected by homelessness and to this day they've helped more than 130 people transitioned from hopelessness it wasn't always the easiest way to run a business as you can imagine there are specific challenges that come with employing people who've lived on the streets however the team persisted and the fact that they were solving a real problem making a true difference in the world resonated with their customers it wasn't just the right thing to do it was good business since its founding the giving keys has sold millions in sales and their products have been sold everywhere from starbucks to nordstrom's i want you to ask yourself are you solving real problems in your work and in life if not considering following caitlyn's lead keep taking action sure and moving forward but keep your eyes open and look for inspiration around you this time of uncertainty has certainly revealed some pretty big problems for us all to tackle our second lesson is the innovative entrepreneurs are willing to challenge the status quo after graduating from college grove city college in case you were wondering greg glier got a nice corporate job the higher ups in the organization quickly realized that gret was a talented and responsible young man and rapidly promoted him through the ranks it wasn't long before he realized that he had met everyone's definition of success he also realized that he was deeply unhappy empty even he knew he had to do something in gretz words in an act of desperation i quit my career and found a teaching job all the way across the world in malawi africa knowing almost no one in the country i impulsively moved there with the hope that i would find meaning and direction for my life now malawi was the poorest country in the world at the time and a few months after moving to malawi gret met a man named blessings and they became friendly one day blessings took gret to the neighboring village to meet rosina a 70 year old woman who was living in a house with a hole in the roof she hadn't eaten in an entire week gret was stunned by her situation and was overcome with the need to help but he didn't have the means blessings told gret that it would take between seven hundred and eight hundred dollars to build a new house without even planning it gret handed the phone to blessings and did his first ever video asking people to help he uploaded the video to social media and people responded generously he posted updates which people loved and rosina had a new house in a matter of months as greta interest in helping others grew he studied philanthropy to see how he could bring more aid to his new neighbors what he found was an antiquated system that lacked transparency and accountability worse yet he discovered that improper incentives were built right into the system in his words big aid was a sea of disappointment so gret created donor c based on the fundraising method that he used to help rosina in the first place he created a tech platform that connected donors with trusted projects for people in need while providing those progress updates that kept donors engaged donors mission is to become the world's fastest growing charity platform to usher in a new age for global charity raising the industry standards for transparency immediacy and innovation with a limit of five hundred dollars per project donor c has already raised over 2.4 million for 6345 projects and has been recognized as a new and innovative way to approach fundraising for small projects how does all of this apply to our lives in this moment well the status quo has been shaken up and in some places completely shattered by recent events there has been no better time in recent history to take a close look at how we're doing everything change is happening at breakneck speeds take this opportunity to create a plan to change the status quo if that status quo is part of the problem you have a unique opportunity to make your own mark on the future our third lesson is innovative entrepreneurs have a highly developed sense of empathy so we've been together long enough now that you expect me to insert an inspirational story here i mean empathy really that's pretty much a slam dunk for me but in the world of virtual presentations you have to keep your audience on their toes so instead i'm going to tell you a student story a few years ago three of my students came to me with an idea to create a micro business accelerator in india to help poor people to create businesses so that they could provide for their families they were particularly interested in helping women to escape terrible situations such as domestic abuse and sex trafficking this was a noble cause the idea had all the hallmarks of that inspirational story that you're now inexplicably hoping to hear from me but not so fast my friends i started asking them simple questions about the business model and to their credit they had reasonable answers i was pleased with the amount of work that they had done on the project and i said to them i have two final questions number one are there any cultural barriers that might prevent this from being successful in india my once chatty students stared back at me blankly i pressed on to my second equally important question have any of you ever been to india i found out quickly that not only had my students not ever been to the country not one of them had even met someone from india i explained to them that you cannot serve a customer that you do not understand and did what any self-respecting professor trying to make a point would do i sent them to india i gave them a single mission talk to people i told them to talk to the people that they were hoping to help to understand what a typical day looks like for them to find out what problems they experienced and of course i encourage them to try to get some feedback on their business idea and before you write me a strongly worded email i want you to know that they had appropriate chaperones translators and we had a partner in country to facilitate the project it only took about 48 hours of talking to potential customers for the students to realize that their model was not going to work at all you'd think that they would have been pretty depressed but they weren't sad at all in fact they were excited the time spent understanding their customers was actually well spent time in fact during one of their interviews they found out about these simple looking brushes that were crudely constructed with thick hard plastic bristles these brushes were used to polish granite and they were in short supply there were many people who had granted that they could polish and sell to support their own families but they couldn't find the brushes to complete the task it was an aha moment for the students and our partner organization instead of creating a business accelerator they could source the materials to make these brushes and teach the one women how to make them and because i don't want to disappoint you here's your inspirational content our students shown in the top picture with a representative of our partner organization went on to form hard rock brushes with our in-country partner the newly formed company immediately employed six women enabling them to escape the cycle of generational poverty the organization went on to grow and even added a second location innovative entrepreneurs must have empathy with the customers they serve in times of uncertainty like these it is wise to identify who we are serving in business and all other areas of our life take the time to understand the world from their point of view and use this process to identify new opportunities to serve that is the key to deep innovation there's a whole approach to innovation based on empathy and we even have a name for it in the innovation world we call it human-centered design what a great name our fourth and final lesson is simple innovative entrepreneurs are just plain gritty i recently bought this book by dr angela duckworth after i heard her speak on a podcast about the concept of grit dr duckworth is a professor of psychology at the university of pennsylvania she's advised the white house world bank nba and nfl teams and fortune 500 ceos her research is centered around one question why do naturally talented people frequently fail to reach their potential while other far less gifted individuals go on to achieve amazing things she found that the secret to outstanding achievement is not talent but a special blend of passion and persistence she called it grit while dr duckworth is referring to humans in general these words are especially true for entrepreneurs and innovators i've seen incredibly talented entrepreneurs fail and i've seen incredibly gritty entrepreneurs succeed with all the odds stacked against them during these trying times we need to be gritty i cannot say it better than former u.s president theodore roosevelt even though president roosevelt delivered his citizenship in a republic speech over a hundred years ago the words are no less true right now each word is so incredibly important and relevant to our current situation i urge you to really contemplate the message as you take in the words it is not the critic who counts not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done them better the credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood who strives valiantly who airs who come short again and again because there is no effort without error and shortcoming but who does actually strive to do the deeds who knows great enthusiasms the great devotions who spends himself in a worthy cause who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at worst if he fails at least fails while daring greatly so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat my friends we are in that very arena right now we need to combine our passion with our persistence to weather this storm then we'll need to use that same exact grit to rebuild i cannot count the number of times that i've heard someone say i can't wait to get back to normal that's completely understandable in fact i'd wager that for many of us there's a real temptation to make the return to normal our goal enter the psychological phenomenon called rosy retrospection this is when we remember past events more positively after they occur this is a phenomenon that is intensified by the pain and chaos that we've experienced in the past year but i have a bold statement to make here the world was not perfect in january twenty twenty despite the tempting view from any rose-colored glasses out there life was not utopic before the pandemic the pandemic caused stress to our international systems all of them political social and economic and just as the dam that breaks after existing expanding cracks have been ignored over decades the global pandemic exposed and exacerbated the existing brokenness in our world we cannot unsee what we have seen the question is how will we as principled leaders respond to what has been revealed the truth is that within the cracks of the way that things used to be lies the freedom and opportunity to fix what is broken in order to innovate and miss the uncertainties we just need to focus on solving real problems challenging the status quo developing deeper empathy and getting gritty certain principles for uncertain times is not just a catchy event theme it is a rallying cry for all of us we have the power to do what is right and the opportunity to repair what has been broken we just need to muster the courage in order to do so thank you so much