SEVEN Fund Announces Winners of its VINE
competition
Collaborative Process Develops
New Methods to Assess SMEs for Funding
Collaborative Process Develops New Methods to Assess
SMEs for Funding
May 12 2009 —Cambridge, Massachusetts - The Social Equity Venture Fund - SEVEN - is pleased to announce the winners of its VINE competition. The competition recognized outstanding contributions to address the question: "What indicators can outside investors measure to help them predict the potential success of emerging market SMEs?" One winner and four honorable mentions were selected.
More than 300 individuals contributed ideas to the first of its kind open-source VINE competition, which awarded $50,000 in prizes to individuals and teams of contributors for developing indicators to evaluate investment risk for emerging market Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Teams then collaborated to development comprehensive assessment frameworks. The finalists were chosen through an online competitive voting process, and final submissions evaluated by an expert jury of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists.
"VINE represents innovation on two fronts," said Andreas Widmer, co-founder of the SEVEN Fund. "The first is the application of open source theory to address an important business problem - the missing middle in SME funding. The second is the quality of the ideas themselves which the competition generated."
"The open source development model has enabled people worldwide to effectively collaborate on hundreds of thousands of software projects to solve problems for large organizations and individuals, Seven's VINE (Virtual Integrated Networking Experience) Project is applying the values, processes, and tools that have enabled open source development's success to generate a different form of intellectual capital - refining metrics for how to best predict the success of developing country entrepreneurial businesses, said Karl Wirth, Director of Security Engineering for Red Hat, Inc. who consulted on the competition's platform development.
The SEVEN Fund will be releasing the winning submission to the public, as well as a compilation of key insights garnered from the competition, during Summer 2009. SEVEN wishes to thank all participants, as well as our panel of judges.
Grand Prize Winner: Framework of Factors and Risk Evaluation
Greg Robson and Dr. Daniel Cummings
This submission was also contributed to by Bryan McCoy of Sustainable Development Capital, LLC and Trudy Bredthauer.
SEVEN also wishes to congratulate our finalists, who received honorable mentions for the following submissions:
- Twelve Variables for Venture Capitalists in Emerging Markets, coordinated by Adam Bronnenkant
- Framework for assessing risk of investment by Trudy Bredthauer and Jacob Bredthauer
- High Level Guidelines for Investing by Bryan McCoy (submitting on behalf of Sustainable Development Capital, LLC)
- Beyond the Indicators: Survival and Determinants of Poverty by Nancy Tappan and Larry Jacques Jr.
Entrepreneurs create products, services and jobs. They expand economies, improve people's lives, provide employment (high and rising wages) and bring about competition. A competitive environment, in turn, gives rise to efficiency, meritocracy and further innovations and entrepreneurial drive.
The potent combination of entrepreneurship and technological innovation can forge an environment that is conducive to further enterprise, involving even government policy in supporting entrepreneurship and innovation.
