MBAs explore if Bolivian artisans can enter the US market

Chris Mullen, MBA 2010, states: "We traveled during Spring Break 2010 to Bolivia to conduct our second field study for [our client,] Jalsuri. We spent our first day in Santa Cruz visiting the Jalsuri store, the local art market, and the shops of several competitors. Next, we jetted to the capital city of La Paz, where we spent the remainder of our expedition. While in La Paz, we conducted in-depth interviews with Jalsuri staff to further our understanding of Jalsuri's current operation, customers, top-selling products, and the import and shipping restrictions that apply to Jalsuri's foreign trade. We also met with a Bolivian export company to get information on Jalsuri's options for exporting products. In addition, we were able to visit several Jalsuri trade partners, including the owner of Comart, who shared his experience exporting Bolivian products to the US. Over the span of two trips, we have been able to visit all three Jalsuri store locations (Santa Cruz, La Paz, and Copacabana), giving us a complete picture of customer demand, store layouts, staffing arrangements, and product variety. While in La Paz, we also visited a number of competitor stores to understand customer preferences, product demand, price points, and to help us benchmark Jalsuri relative to other locally-made craft retailers. On our final day, we managed a trip to Copacabana, at the edge of the famous Lake Titicaca.

MBAs look at how to reach a critical mass of donors for a client in China

Michelle Lee MBA 2010 writes:

Team 66 traveled to Hong Kong Dec. 16-22, 2009, on behalf of our client Wokai, an online-based microfinance organization focused exclusively on China. We chose Hong Kong as our research destination because Wokai had recently launched a Hong Kong chapter, and our research thus far showed that cities with local chapters produced the highest number of “passionate” donors who contribute the largest amounts and most frequently. This was important as Wokai is struggling to reach a critical mass of donors, and as a niche product, it needs to secure a sizable donor base of “passionate” believers, in order to be sustainable (unlike an organization such as Kiva, which serves all geographies and appeals to a mass audience). Thus, we set out to interview the board of the Hong Kong chapter and to follow them through their launch strategy. In addition, another critical part of our trip involved conducting in-depth interviews with donors from Wokai’s target segment of expatriates, given that Hong Kong has a large population of “high-potential” expats—those who have significant disposable income and who are likely to have strong enough ties to China to care about this niche product.

We first reached out to more than 250 UCLA Anderson alumni who fit the bill and ended up conducting focus group-like sessions with 10 of them. In addition, we also held meetings with the Hong Kong board, spending most of the time with the chapter’s two co-presidents. In general, through the interviews with the potential donors/alumni, we learned that credibility and transparency are major concerns, particularly since Wokai targets China and China is known to be fraught with fraud. Similarly, through the meetings with the Hong Kong board, we found out that most of the result of their outreach was made possible because nearly all of the Hong Kong donors thus far had personal ties to someone on the board. Because of the trip, we were able to uncover that Wokai had a fundamental “trust” issue that would need to be resolved through improved borrower updates (which would address the transparency concerns) and through revamped online messaging (which would address the credibility problem).

MBAs win Energy Case Competition at U Michigan Ross

UCLA CIBER sponsored and congratulates Adam Green, Dave Castle, Pok Hoo, Hiromasa Ebihara, and Andrew Hunt for winning the 2010 Renewable Energy Case Competition held at the University of Michigan Ross School. The UCLA Anderson team went up against teams from Harvard Business School, Northwestern's Kellogg School, and Cornell's Johnson School. Once again, our congratulations!!!

Students studying microinsurance policies in Brazil are blogging

Find out more about our students conducting their field study in Brazil regarding microinsurance policies: http://uclamicrofinance.weebly.com/blog.html