June through August Developments

Apologies for the break in blogging.  Many things kept us from following up on the last blog.  So without further ado, here's a recap of the 3 months directly following our last post:

June Haiti Trip
The remainder of the trip to Les Cayes proved to be a mixed experience.  Since a prior World Bank project had wrapped up by March, our local partners were forced to focus on other income-generating opportunities.  This limited their availability to work with us during our stay there.  On the other side, we were able to fund the first semi-formal sales test of the project.  Even though the test could not commence until after our departure, we were able to employ a local woman to sell briquettes for two weeks, keeping records of sales and customer feedback during that time.  The informal results helped us confirm the price points and acceptance rate of the product.... though we still eagerly await receipt of the final records.

July IDDS Conference
The International Development Design Summit is a conference started by one of our advisors, Amy Smith, several years ago.  This year, the conference was held in Fort Collins at the Colorado State University campus and focused on dissemination, consequently attracting a greater balance of non-technical attendees (including yours truly).  Fuel from the Fields was able to assemble a mix of members from business, other social sciences, and agronomists for its conference team, including Miliane - one of our Haitian charcoal trainers.  Through a series of research sessions and tests, we moved away from an organization helping form micro-entrepreneurs and began to model how a cooperative may succeed in Haiti.  Our final presentation attracted a lot of good contacts in the social enterprise field as we continue our market tests.

August Venture Lab Workshop
As part of our grant from the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, we attended a Bottom of Pyramid venture workshop at MIT.  Our 4 person workshop team was well balanced: an entrepreneur, an engineer, a designer, and an agronomist.  Further feedback and tests saw us continue to evolve our model toward a more concentrated model based upon resource economics.  Since our next trip was delayed until January... we are currently involved in formulating our next market test while we work on building our team, our advisors, and potential partners.

Soon... more on our exploits in September and October!