Courses from Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University:
Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University
Executive Education and Organisational Development
Else Boutkan - Alumni International Full-time MBA'00
Else Boutkan (MBA ’00) develops business plans for entrepreneurs and companies with technology suitable for the developing world. There are business opportunities in sustainable technology she says, just not enough entrepreneurs in the know.
Pull-out quote: “Sustainable technology is a booming market. I feel I am one of the pioneers.”
“Every minute, ten people in the world die because of lack of clean drinking water. That is 5 million a year. Everyone knows about poverty and hunger, but drinking water is one of the biggest disasters for the third world right now. This is the main message of the foundation I am setting up called the Blue Peter Foundation; and the focus of my work over the last few years.
I work as a consultant in sustainability. Many of my assignments involve developing business plans that enable entrepreneurs in the first world to bring their technology to the market in the third world. Sustainable technology is a rapidly growing industry with more and more opportunities. And entrepreneurship in third world countries is a tool that has value both for reducing poverty in a sustainable way, and for making money.
I set up my consultancy firm in 2001, a year after my MBA. My first assignment was with twelve multinationals, working with NGOs and other organisations to create an ecological programme. I built up a network of entrepreneurs and contacts in the water industry which lead to many more assignments, and I’ve been working in this field ever since.
The basic problem is that water in the third world is polluted. Around one billion people are forced to buy water from trucks or in bottles for which they pay ten to 100 times more than we pay; often 50 percent of the money they have.
In the first world, we have technology that would provide them with clean water at a much cheaper rate: solar-powered machines that remove the impurities in a distillation process, for instance. This technology is being developed by spin-offs of multinationals or small entrepreneurs working from home. And they all have the same question: how can we expand into third world markets?
This is where I come in. Because of my MBA I know how to translate these ideas into a solid business case. The entrepreneur approaches me, and then I approach various organisations such as banks to finance the hardware, and NGOs to contact the local people and train a local entrepreneur close to the market. It is strange to talk about these people as a market. But bringing this technology to the people in a way that both the local entrepreneur and the entrepreneur here can make a living out of it, ensures we are helping them in a sustainable way.
A recent example is a programme we developed in India in which 50 small villages are each given a machine. An NGO has appointed a ‘water entrepreneur’ to be responsible for the machine, and trained them to maintain it and collect money from the villagers to repay the bank – in this case, a Dutch bank that is financing the local NGOs, who bought the equipment from the Dutch entrepreneur, who contacted me.
A lot of my work is about partnership building. Often I am like a bridge between the corporate world and the non-profit world, and a lot of differences still exist. This is getting easier as awareness grows and sustainability gets higher on the corporate agenda. Sustainability is only just reaching the mainstream now and I feel like one of the pioneers. But we still need development on the business side – more entrepreneurs, business concepts, and economic drivers.
My most recent assignment is the Blue Peter Foundation. Rather than technology, this is about generating publicity and media presence which requires marketing and strategic thinking – skills I learned in my MBA. Charities such as Blue Peter need a business perspective to boom, and I am in a position to provide that.
Al Gore’s movie ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ was designed to raise public awareness. What we see now is that every political party has climate on his or her agenda. With the Blue Peter Foundation we want to achieve a similar thing – raise awareness about the world’s water issues to increase pressure on governments to set this problem higher on the agenda.
Else Boutkan: www.somethingelse.nl
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