Imagine the following. You are in the audience of a business plan competition. The next team to present is d.light, a for-profit social enterprise that plans to bring light to people without access to reliable electricity. Two young men introduce themselves as the cofounders of d.light, and indicate that they will begin their presentation with a demonstration. The lights go out. In a few seconds, you see a dim light at the front of the room, and smell smoke and burning kerosene. After about 30 seconds, your eyes start to water, and it becomes slightly uncomfortable to breathe. The lights switch back on and the smoke clears. The young men apologize for the lack of light and the smoke but say that they staged the demonstration to illustrate a point. Around 1.2 billion people, or more than one-fifth of the world’s population, have no access to electricity, and about a billion more have an unreliable or intermittent supply. An estimated 500 million households must burn some sort of fuel, such as kerosene, for cooking or lighting. Kerosene fuel is expensive, dangerous, and toxic to both people and the environment. In fact, the United Nations estimates that kerosene fumes kill 1.5 million people annually and cause countless health complications for others. The scene described here actually took place—several times. It is how Sam Goldman and Ned Tozun, d.light’s cofounders, introduced the company at business plan competitions and when pitching to investors. d.light is an international consumer products company serving “base of the pyramid” consumers without access to reliable electricity. Although d.light technically started in a class at Stanford University, we can trace its beginning to Sam Goldman’s youth and early adulthood. Growing up, Goldman’s parents worked for the United States Agency for International Development, a government agency that provides economic and humanitarian assistance in countries across the globe. Goldman lived in Pakistan, Peru, India, Canada, and several other countries. As a young adult, while working for the Peace Corps, he lived for four years in a West African village without electricity. A neighbor boy was burned badly in a kerosene fire, an event that impacted Goldman deeply. At one point during his time in the village, Goldman was given a battery-powered LED headlamp and was struck by the dramatic difference that simply having light at night can make in a person’s life. He could now cook, read, and do things at night that were unimaginable without the benefits reliable lighting provides. Impacted by this experience, Goldman sought out a graduate program that would provide an opportunity for him to start thinking about creating a business to take light to people without access to reliable electricity. He landed at Stanford, which was starting a program in social enterprise. A pivotal class was Jim Patelli’s 2006– 2007 Entrepreneurial Design course. Class members formed teams, with each team receiving a challenge to address a significant issue in low-income countries such as Burma. Goldman teamed up with Ned Tozun, a business classmate, and two engineering students, Erica Estrade and Xian Wu. The team tackled the problem of light for people without access to reliable electricity and developed a rough prototype of a portable LED light that solar power could recharge. That spring, the team traveled to Burma to go into villages that lacked access to electricity to introduce their device. Villagers told them they spent up to 40 percent of their income on kerosene. When shown how their crude prototype could provide light at night and be recharged during the day simply by deploying small solar panels on their homes, the villagers were so taken, one woman started weeping with joy. According to one account of the team’s trip, in one village the local police confiscated the prototypes. They, too, needed light at night.....

Discussion Questions:

1.Why is the problem of bringing light to people without access to reliable electricity not being tackled in a meaningful way by a large lighting company, such as General Electric or Philips?
2.What qualities do Sam Goldman and his team have that will continue to help them solve the problem of providing light to the billions of people in the world who are without adequate access to reliable electricity?
3.Why does Sam Goldman go out of his way to talk about the importance of delight's business plan?
In what ways do you think having a meticulously created business plan helped delights in its launch efforts?
4.If you were one of delight's cofounders, what would your marketing strategy be? How would you go about educating people in remote areas of the world about your product and the benefits associated with purchasing it?