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<h2 class="hd hd-2 unit-title">Why Look at Incomplete Pitches?</h2>
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<p>When learning a skill, it's natural to want to learn from those that are great at it. It's also valuable, however, to observe those that are still learning, whether they are a few steps ahead of you or your immediate peers. You can learn from what you think is effective in these examples and identify what you do not like or what you want to avoid. You can include these ideas into your own work. The key here is constructive critique and introspection: thinking carefully about what is good or bad in any given example, being honest about whether your work has the same qualities, and being willing to rework based on feedback and advice.</p>
<p>Pitching is a great case study here. For this final set of examples in the final week of our course, we want to share a few pitch sections from applications to the 2019 Solve Global Challenges which are either incomplete or are limited in some way. Perhaps they only answer 1 or 2 of the five big questions, or potentially they answer almost none. We've tried to select applications that are relatively robust and seem like they're doing good work, but they just aren't presented as well as they could be. A pitch is how you share your work, not the work itself!</p>
<p>A few key caveats:</p>
<ul>
<li>The use of these examples does not imply any opinion from Solve (positive or negative) on the organizations and efforts described.</li>
<li>The critiques we describe are applicable to many other cases as well - we have not singled these out because they're uniquely flawed. One of the goals of Solve's open innovation format is that anyone can comment to help improve applications, and this is a longer-term version of that process.</li>
<li>Writing a good pitch is hard, particularly in a non-native language - we're focused on content, not on grammar.</li>
</ul>
<p>Finally, reviewing a lot of examples is part of getting better at pitching, but you will also just need practice. We hope that these examples help you review and revise whatever project you may be pitching.</p>
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<h2 class="hd hd-2 unit-title">What Do You Actually Do?</h2>
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<p>Many pitches, both written and particularly verbal, spend lots of time being excited about the problem or the broad solution they are pursuing. As a result, they may be working on a very important issue, but at the end of their pitch, you do not know much about what they do, how they do it, or what they will do next. This is easier to fix in writing, because you can edit and trim a written pitch. However, in verbal pitches, you have to practice, both for timed and impromptu settings.</p>
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<p>Dinâmica is an early startup in Brazil that applied to Solve's 2019 Circular Economy Challenge. Here's their pitch:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">We have a serious global mobility crisis, the individual transportation systems has failed in big cities. The car doesn’t fit in the public space and uses a huge amount of resources and pollutes the air, water and soil with fumes and gases from ICE's. Many are trying to make the cars better, but we have an inherent urban space problem that will not be solved sticking to this solution.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">When we analyzed all the individual transport technologies we figure out that the vehicle of the future has arrived a long time ago: the bicycle! It’s uses very little resources to be built, is energy effective, occupies one of the smallest spaces among all other vehicles, burns fat and keep you fit and healthy!</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Despite the benefits of the bicycle, the bicycle industry is in the wrong way when it comes to circular economy. We created Dinâmica to change that!</p>
<p>(You can see their <a href="https://solve.mit.edu/challenges/circular-economy/solutions/7546" target="_blank">full application here</a>.)</p>
<p>Their pitch spends the plurality of the time on the problem (40-50% of the text) and even more on a general solution (30-40%). Only at the very end of their written pitch do we get a sense of what the company might do. Even with the rest of the application to provide more details, this pitch provides little information on what the company does – they could provide a bikeshare service, do bike maintenance and resale, or (their actual work) build and sell bicycles designed for repair and reuse in a zero-impact factory.</p>
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<p>As a second example, consider Life Hub's pitch for the Early Childhood Development Challenge:</p>
<p><em>Although financial literacy/capability is one of the most critical social and economic issues of our time, current methods being used to teach children financial skills are an unequivocal failure. Today, children are continuing to transition into adulthood financially illiteracy and incapable culminating in unprecedented personal and societal crises. </em></p>
<p><em>We’re a team of 34 technologists, child psychologists, engineers, finance professionals, manufacturing pros, learning and industry experts who came together to solve one of the biggest social and economic problems in the world - financial illiteracy and incapability. </em></p>
<p><em>A product of 10,000 hours of closed-doors R&D, Life Hub Learning Center is a home-based A.I.-powered education technology that recasts how young children learn financial and entrepreneurship skills. </em></p>
<p><em>Against the backdrop of the current social and economic instabilities around the world, our education technology is poised to bend the trajectory of equality of opportunity by educating young children financial, business and life managements skills in an entirely new way. </em> </p>
<p>Unlike Dynâmica, we have a basic sense for what the group does – education tech for financial literacy – but we still have few details on what their solution actually looks like, whether it is implemented yet, and what paths are important for scale. Their pitch refers to the importance and difficulty of the problem in three of the four paragraphs, but describes what their solution is in only one. </p>
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<h2 class="hd hd-2 unit-title">Who Is Your Audience?</h2>
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<p>The audience is a critical part of any writing or presentation, and pitching is no exception. You might pitch the same idea to technical experts, potential volunteers, potential business and investment partners, or social impact competitions like Solve. Each of those audiences may merit a different approach, and being able to adjust your language and format can make you more effective. Here are two pitches that are probably not a great fit for Solve's social impact audience.</p>
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<p>First, let's analyze a pitch from Kumwe Solutions:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Annual demand for premium maize in Rwanda is 70,000+ tons. Whilst smallholder farmers across the country produce 5 times this premium demand, only 10% is sourced locally and the gap filled by costly imports. This shortfall in local supply is a result of rapid declines in quality during post harvest handling (aflatoxin infection) and challenges around rural aggregation. </p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Since 2016, Kumwe has been disrupting the maize value chain in Rwanda with a new model for post-harvest processing and aggregation. Using ‘just-in-time’ transport management, industrial post harvest processing and top-tier technology and analytics, Kumwe’s model bridges the gap between agro-processors and local farmers. As a result, Kumwe is now the single largest maize aggregator in the country and has achieved unprecedented >99% quality acceptance from premium processors.</p>
<p>Source Application: <a href="https://solve.mit.edu/challenges/community-driven-innovation/solutions/10688" target="[object Object]">Kumwe Solutions</a> (2019 application, Community-Driven Innovation Challenge)</p>
<p><strong>Potential Flaws: Is this written for the right audience?</strong></p>
<p>This pitch covers a lot in two dense paragraphs - a mismatch in the market for maize, the potential role of smallholder farmers, a specific set of technologies, and an overall sense of scale. This pitch is a great example of why knowing your audience is so important. Currently, the language and focus seem aimed at agricultural technology investors - there are lots of precise words, allowing a lot of meaning in a few sentences. That could be very beneficial, but this terminology may also make it hard for a general audience to understand. Unless you know that your audience is coming from a specific industry with common terms, you should try to have your pitch be understandable by anyone with a reasonable general education.</p>
<p>A second potential weakness is that this pitch does not focus on or connect back to the social impact of their work. This is another case where audience matters. For potential investors in Kumwe, this pitch may be very effective – it sounds like the company is doing well and has found a good product-market fit. For a social impact competition, however, where their impact comes from or how that impact will grow is unclear.</p>
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<p>As a second example that may be pitched at an overly narrow audience, consider this pitch from <a href="https://solve.mit.edu/challenges/healthy-cities/solutions/7127" target="_blank">CitiesRISE</a>:</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Rapidly urbanizing, technology-based societies of today present socio-economic and culture changes that increase risks to young people's mental health. The magnitude of this problem cannot be successfully addressed by existing top down, facility based, incremental scale up traditional models.</p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">CitiesRISE is the first global action platform focused on the nexus of mental health, youth, and their cities with the aim of turning the tide on depression, addiction and suicide through evidence-based interventions. </p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">CitiesRISE network of cities and partnerships: </p>
<ol style="padding-left: 30px;">
<li>Provides a platform for create innovative, cross-sectoral public private partnerships that leverage the full spectrum of technological and evidence to support solutions.</li>
<li>Creates hyper-local-global networks of cities and organizations that provide place-based, contextualized solutions with the support and collaboration of global evidenced-based models and partnerships. </li>
<li>Provides an opportunity for rapid Iterations of solutions that increase access to prevention, care, support and treatment, while utilizing young people as peer counselors.</li>
</ol>
<p>CitiesRISE clearly acts as a network, and they are working on issues relating to mental health for young people. Beyond that, it may be hard to understand what they do given the terminology and their abstract description. This is a real risk for solutions that propose big-picture or systems change - the solution may necessarily be complex and involve many stakeholders, and explaining the specifics of what you do in simple terms can be hard. There will often be simpler-to-describe ideas competing for attention. Unless you're pitching to a group of people well-versed in these terms, it's worth editing for simplicity, or adding a specific example.</p>
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<h2 class="hd hd-2 unit-title">What Is the Context?</h2>
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<p>As a final potential limitation, some pitches spend all of their time on their solution and its qualities. As a result, they can lack the context that helps the audience understand why the solution is important, or why it matters for a particular context. It's easy to spend too much of a pitch on the problem, but it's also a risk to spend too much time on the technical details of how a solution is designed, instead of the other 3-4 questions. </p>
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<p><a href="https://solve.mit.edu/challenges/healthy-cities/solutions/9487" target="_blank">Roll-a-Rack</a> applied for Solve's 2019 Healthy Cities Challenge with this pitch: </p>
<p style="padding-left: 30px;">Current solar module racking systems are multicomponent, require preordering, transporting, inventorying, and labor-intensive deployment. The patent pending Roll-a-Rack system produces the rack from raw material, on demand and on site during the installation process using portable roll forming. Hardware (material) cost is 30-45% less than competitors, it is two to five times faster to install. A Department of Energy Phase I SBIR confirmed it can reduce the racking cost of solar installations by 30%. In addition to lower cost and faster installation, Roll-a-Rack has the following competitive advantages: Simplifies the supply chain; Provides a tray in which ballast may be optimally distributed; Shields the entire underside of the solar module to minimize wind uplift forces; Electrically connects every module, providing a continuous electrical grounding frame for the entire solar array; and Structurally connects neighboring solar modules which spreads local stresses across multiple modules.</p>
<p>Unlike some previous examples, we know a lot about their solution. However, their pitch says very little about the Impact Opportunity or how the solution addresses it, focusing entirely on what the solution is and why it is effective. It also has a lot of technical jargon, and the second half of the pitch is a list of design features which sound good but don't answer a question of how it will scale or impact more people. This pitch seems closer to a value proposition for a new product than a pitch for a social enterprise. Both value proposition and pitching are important to consider, but they have very different contexts!</p>
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