EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

About the Social Impact Award

At the beginning of the semester, the team was introduced with the Social Impact Award (SIA), an international organization which aims to promote social entrepreneurship. How does it do that? Social Impact Award, founded in 2009, runs education and incubation programs in more than 15 countries in Europe, Africa, and Central Asia to support early-stage social entrepreneurs in developing and implementing innovative business solutions to tackle the most critical societal challenges of our times. We do so by hosting events and organizing workshops to raise awareness for social entrepreneurship, teaching the necessary skills to navigate from vague intentions to promising ventures, providing access to networks and promoting the best teams with the Social Impact Award.

Problem Statement

The SIA has a clear vision and is expanding in more and more countries by licensing their business model and brand. As a multinational enterprise, it should continuously monitor its industry to be able to react to new chances or threats. However, as the venture consistently keeps on growing and scaling their services internationally, it becomes harder and harder to keep an overview of the industry and competitors. In an interview, the project partner Jakob Detering (Managing Director of SIA) defined “not knowing what competitors are out there that compete for the same target group as SIA does” as the critical problem the group of students is supposed to address.

The Unique Solution

As to solve this problem, the group of students combed through over 190 organizations to then create a catalog of profiles for 59 of them, which fit the criteria. These profiles of the competitors were then integrated into an interactive map. Furthermore, interviews were performed with best practices and with direct competitors, to give the project partner even more information about “what competitors are out there.”

Learnings and Guidance

As a final step, building upon the knowledge gained in the procedure of writing and researching, the group formulated takeaways for the SIA. The most important learning include advice on search engine optimization, strategic partnerships and the introduction of a standardized monitoring process.

Cooperation Partner

• Social Impact Award (gGmbH)
  Lindengasse 56/ 18-19
  1070 Wien
  Austria

Contact Person

• Matteo Pastore
  matteo_pastore@hotmail.de

Student team

• Matteo Pastore

• Julian Schedina

• Jordi Alexander Moll

• Joshua Carlito Rohrböck

Projektbetreuung

• Dr. Peter Vandor