Author: Matthew Michaelides.

Prospective INSEAD MBA students often wonder, what does “Business as a Force for Good” really mean? How does this public call-to-action really distinguish INSEAD and its community of faculty, students, and alumni?

While at INSEAD, a group of five MBA classmates and I discovered our own answer to this question first-hand. As members of the Social Enterprise Consulting Experience (SECE) club, we worked with UK-based NGO Blue Ventures and The Rocket Foundation, a Swiss based Foundation, on a 3-month project with the potential to significantly accelerate efforts to protect coastal waters and fisheries. Although Blue Ventures was already active in facilitating community-driven ocean conservation efforts at dozens of sites in 14 countries, they needed our help setting up a new fundraising vehicle to further expand their coastal waters recovery work.

In the end, including through our own interviews leveraging the INSEAD network, we provided recommendations that framed strategic alternatives and identified key tradeoffs and considerations for the new fund. Some of our key insights focused on 1) flagging interdependencies between the funding mechanism for BV’s new fund and the fund’s investment focus, and 2) identifying patterns in how peer funds had handled key governance challenges over time. As Blue Ventures now prepares to launch its new fund in the coming months, we are grateful to have been able to play a role in their deeply impactful work.

In addition to being able to help Blue Ventures and The Rocket Foundation, we also found the experience to be rewarding for ourselves personally and professionally. Notably, the project gave us a fantastic experiential learning experience, enabled us to have outsize impact on a topic important to us, and gave us great subject matter learnings on NGO fundraising techniques and impact-focused financing vehicles.

On a more tactical level, working with Blue Ventures and The Rocket Foundation gave us significant first-hand insight into the value that primary research can play in yielding tailored, actionable insights. Although there is often a tendency to rely on readily available secondary data sources, we learned on this project how you need both primary and secondary research to get the full story. In addition, we also benefited from the idiosyncratic challenges and learnings that each of us gain from working in a diverse, international team, which in many ways is what INSEAD is all about.

However, perhaps most of all, the project was a great showcase of how working together, we were able to derive unique insight and deepen our collective impact on important global challenges. As newly minted INSEAD alumni, we look forward to seeing new contributions from INSEAD students through SECE and continuing to work together and with other INSEAD alumni as a Force for Good.

Matthew Michaelides (MBA 21J) is a Consultant at Bain and Company in Boston. Ankit Sheth (MBA 21D) and Johnny Chen (MBA 21D) also worked on the project for Blue Ventures and Rocket Foundation.