launched may 2012 boston region - youth trade is one of 3 main services of www.yesweb.org 80 prospect street cambridge ma -the other two being biannual youth summits:2010 sweden ; 2008 azerbajan; 2006 kenya ; 2004 mexico; 2002 egypt that have linked 50 countries youth and 400 projects and "Enterprise Studio" - an innovation architecture for co-creation of projects among multi-stakeholder groups
boston globe article http://www.bostonglobe.com/business/2012/05/25/young-innovators-mar...
[examples of youth trade invited to pitch at retaierl hosted competitions]
Nicolas Warren had a great idea for a new product — chocolate snacks for athletes — but the budding business owner did not have the experience to crack the retail food market.
Then Warren, 29, heard about an opportunity in March to pitch his concept to Whole Foods Market, the giant food chain that carries thousands of boutique items. It was an event hosted by Youth Entrepreneurship and Sustainability, a Cambridge organization that helps entrepreneurs 35 and younger find markets for their products.
The young entrepreneurs made 30-second “elevator pitches” to executives from Whole Foods. “It was fairly nerve-wracking,” Warren said.
It was also successful. His business was one of 20 companies, many from Massachusetts, that presented at the YouthTrade summit and whose products debuted this week on the shelves of the 28 Whole Foods stores in the North Atlantic region.
YouthTrade is the brainchild of founder Poonam Ahluwalia, who conceived of the event after attending a conference last year at Conscious Capitalism, an institute cofounded by Whole Foods chief executive John Mackey that promotes “entrepreneurship, competition, and voluntary trade.” Ahluwalia realized the companies at the conference, which included retail chains such as The Container Store, Panera Bread Co., and Trader Joe’s, were interested in helping to grow new businesses.
“It came to me: They have the markets, we have the entrepreneurs,” said Ahluwalia.
Ahluwalia said one of the biggest obstacles for new businesses is persuading retail outlets and other sales channels to take a chance on their products. “Good ideas are just a good idea until someone supports it,” she said. “There’s a lot of support and access to financing for young entrepreneurs. The biggest reason many businesses fail, though, is because there’s no real access to market.”
Now that the first companies have been placed, Ahluwalia said she wants to propose new products to Whole Foods every three months, and is looking to partner with other stores such as Nordstrom and The Container Store.
In June, Ahluwalia will launch versions of her group overseas, starting in Nigeria. She then plans to expand to Guinea and Sierra Leone, thanks to a donation from the African Capacity Building Foundation, a foundation in Zimbabwe that works to build sustainable growth on the continent.
Poorvi Patodia, another entrepreneur at the March event, owns Biena Foods, maker of chickpea-based snacks. YouthTrade helped to get her products onto local shelves faster than she could on her own, Patodia said. She also met other young businesspeople struggling with the same issues.
“They help us connect to other entrepreneurs,” she said. “That’s a huge part of building a community of like-minded people.”
Getting a product onto Whole Food shelves is a difficult proposition at best, and can take months. The chain maintains a schedule through the year to manage its reviews of new products, moving from category to category, with a panel of Whole Foods employees sifting through a myriad of applicants. Competition is fierce.
“We get applications from hundreds of products a week, at least,” said Kimberley Rose, Whole Foods vice president for the North Atlantic region. The chain isn’t necessarily looking for specific items, she said, but products do need to be different enough to stand out on store shelves.
The YouthTrade event helped Whole Foods shortcut its normal review process by bringing a number of high quality products together at one time, according to Rose. “The quality and ingredients of the products were right along the lines of what we were looking for,” she said. “It’s hard to find amazing products all in one place. That was the score for us.”
Whole Foods is working with business owners from the March event to hammer out the details of contracts and get products on the shelves. “Now it’s a matter of how many stores they can put us in,” Warren said. “I’m feeling pretty good.
While Boston is full of young entrepreneurs brimming with ideas, Warren said that YouthTrade aside, there is little support for start-ups that are not focused in the technology world.
“Boston is a huge tech hub,” he said. “If you’re not a phone app or biomedical device, it’s hard to find people to help you.”
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not dis-similar to goals of youthtrade is the maker faire movement you can see may 2012 san francisco stall holders at maker faire http://makerfaire.com/bayarea/2012/makerinfo/
other references include maker faire section of blog http://blog.makezine.com/category/events-3/maker-faire-events/
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===================please note most of this column is due to be re-edited we hope to issue a list of yunus top 10 stories but when it comes to solutions matching those challeges there's all to play for as web3 is humanity's last chnace to leap ahead
hottest youth-spring question of our life and times-can online education end youth unemployment for ever ? yes but only if you help map how!
Breaking News to action now!
About Pro-Youth economics at Norman Macrae Foundation online library of norman macrae - The Economist's Unacknowledged Giant -videos 1 2 -fansweb NMFoundation- youth projects - include yunuschoolusa
fullest press reports Grameen Brand Partnership Architecture
exponential impact advisory: the social business youth networks inspired by muhammad yunus -without which millennium goal actions networks would be way behind are worth far more than any individual parts according to Norman Macrae Foundation trilliondollaraudit methodology and charter notespace
Beyond the extraordinary investment of the members bank at Grameen, and the approximate third share its members foundation holds in grameenphone, here is our Unofficial League Table of Most Impactful Social Business Investments around yunus - last update 1 dec 2012
! Grameen Solar
2 Grameen Mobile Nursing nets and college
3 Portfolio of investments linkedin by Japan
4 Portfolio of youth-led networking inventions in US educationsystem tertiar and secondary - transparency note NM Foundation has minor donation/loan interest
5 Investments in Grameen as collaboration brand linked in out of paris- the origin of global social business partnership funds
6 OpenTech investments of Grameen Intel
-------- while not controlled by yunus we see wholeplanetfoundation microcredit investment table and conscious capitalsm movements and hugely important to advancing pro-youth economicsmission of friends of youth and yunus
email chris.macrae@yahoo.co.ukif you have questions or recommendations of entries that should be in this league table
-please read notes about what pro-youth economists mean by superapps being most
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