Notes Jim Poss
Notes on Case
“Jim Poss”
Jim Poss, a second year full-time MBA student at Babson College, has a passion for preserving and protecting the environment. He uses a summer internship and Babson courses to search for opportunities and evaluate them. By the final semester he focuses on a solar-powered trash compactor. When he graduates he puts all his efforts into his new venture and soon lands an order from Vail for one of his trash compactors, which will be installed in a remote area of the ski resort.
Location: Greater Boston
Date: 2003-2004
Industry: Solar-powered trash compactors
Age of entrepreneur: Late-20s
Topics: Entrepreneurship as a career choice, finding and shaping an opportunity, team building, networking, bootstrapping, 4F financing, environmental products, developing new products, product pricing, manufacturing, patents,.
First of all, assess Jim Poss. Here are some important items to bring out:
Jim has a passion for protecting and preserving the environment.
By his senior year in high school he knew that he wanted to be involved with environmental issues.
He read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which is generally regarded as one of the most important influences in the early days of the environmental movement. Here is the citation from the Ecology Hall of Fame:
“In 1992, a panel of distinguished Americans declared Rachel Carson's Silent Spring the most influential book of the past 50 years. This was one of the latest in a long line of tributes to a woman who almost single-handedly alerted Americans to the dark side of science in alliance with industrial society. Her measured, carefully-worded yet passionate prose was all the more damning because she, herself, was a scientist.” http://www.ecotopia.org/ehof/carson/bio.html (As an aside, ask, “Who has read Silent Spring?” In general, most students have never heard of it, let alone read it. If the instructor asks this question, he should urge every student to put it on their list of books to read
“Jim Poss”
Jim Poss, a second year full-time MBA student at Babson College, has a passion for preserving and protecting the environment. He uses a summer internship and Babson courses to search for opportunities and evaluate them. By the final semester he focuses on a solar-powered trash compactor. When he graduates he puts all his efforts into his new venture and soon lands an order from Vail for one of his trash compactors, which will be installed in a remote area of the ski resort.
Location: Greater Boston
Date: 2003-2004
Industry: Solar-powered trash compactors
Age of entrepreneur: Late-20s
Topics: Entrepreneurship as a career choice, finding and shaping an opportunity, team building, networking, bootstrapping, 4F financing, environmental products, developing new products, product pricing, manufacturing, patents,.
First of all, assess Jim Poss. Here are some important items to bring out:
Jim has a passion for protecting and preserving the environment.
By his senior year in high school he knew that he wanted to be involved with environmental issues.
He read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which is generally regarded as one of the most important influences in the early days of the environmental movement. Here is the citation from the Ecology Hall of Fame:
“In 1992, a panel of distinguished Americans declared Rachel Carson's Silent Spring the most influential book of the past 50 years. This was one of the latest in a long line of tributes to a woman who almost single-handedly alerted Americans to the dark side of science in alliance with industrial society. Her measured, carefully-worded yet passionate prose was all the more damning because she, herself, was a scientist.” http://www.ecotopia.org/ehof/carson/bio.html (As an aside, ask, “Who has read Silent Spring?” In general, most students have never heard of it, let alone read it. If the instructor asks this question, he should urge every student to put it on their list of books to read