This semester, CBE is excited to announce our partnership with Breaktime, LLC. Breaktime is a student-run business in Cambridge whose goal is to create employment opportunities, vocational training, and career mentorship to homeless individuals in the community. The company was founded by Tony Shu and Connor Schoen, two undergraduates from the class of 2021 whose commitment to the Cambridge community and desire to build a sustainable employment model to alleviate a critical issue in our city have inspired all of us on the CBE team. Currently, Breaktime manages a catering service in partnership with local breakfast food providers like Union Square Donuts. This catering service works with student groups, corporations, and other local event organizers while training and employing individuals experiencing homelessness in the city. Simultaneously, Breaktime has just built out a salesforce team that utilizes the company’s growing workforce to do high-skill marketing and sales work in partnership with other companies and caterers in Boston. The company’s long-term vision is to open a brick-and-mortar location in Cambridge, Breaktime Café, to centralize sales and implement the company’s employment vision fully. We’re proud to support the company as they continue to take important steps towards realizing their brick-and-mortar goal. To help drive the execution of Breaktime’s medium- and long-term objectives, we have provided Breaktime with a renewable $5,000 grant to fund existing operations and future development. Our leadership team, in addition, has begun to provide the company with operational and strategic advice, transferring a lot of the same skills that have made our consulting group so successful with both Fortune 100 and startup clients. This partnership is CBE’s first step into the realm of social enterprise: companies in the private sector whose goals and operations are geared towards the greater good of the communities in which they reside. Moreover, our work with Breaktime emblematizes our commitment to a broad vision of sustainability, one that prioritizes public health, accessibility, and mobility opportunities for everyone in our community. Check out the work Breaktime is doing at their website, https://www.breaktime.us/

We have a unique position here on campus. As students, we're tasked with learning and completing our coursework. As consultants, we're tasked with going above and beyond for our clients. As members of the Harvard community, we're tasked with supporting the community and shaping it for the better. We take this last point to heart as a mission driven organization that hopes to promote sustainability through its initiatives and resources. And that's why I'm so excited that our CBE Ventures Initiative was so successful. There was an idea. The idea was to bring together a remarkable group of people to see if they could build something more. We knew that our fellow students were full of initiative, drive, and innovative ideas. All they needed was that extra nudge to bring their ideas to fruition. CBE Ventures was designed to fill the gap where there were no opportunities in the Fall semester for entrepreneurs to push their startups and ventures to the next level. Offering $15,000 in prize money across three different prizes, we knew we could help these companies succeed. After seeing all of the applications, it was very difficult for us to choose just ten finalists. All of the applications were incredible as a testament to the high caliber of entrepreneurs on campus. We were really glad to see undergrad driven projects and teams with vast social impact scopes ranging from education to energy to transportation. Our incredible judges hailing from incredible organizations helped us form a strong foundation to the the competition. Scott Xiao, CSO of Luminopia brought considerable background in the health-tech space. Jon Garrity, CEO of Tagup, brought a wealth of experience with startups and technology. Finally, Cayman Somerville, Recruitment and Wet Lab Development Manager at Greentown Labs, brought incredible insights into the sustainability space. We're very grateful for their coming and judging for us. Congratulations to our fantastic winners! There are some really incredible companies here. MakerFleet won our Sustainability Prize for their Cloud platform for 3D Printing, helping improve product iteration and reducing waste with sustainable materials. The company is led by Harvard Undergrads and supports local businesses and schools. Apothecary was our Runner-Up. This awesome company recommends sustainable and healthy beauty products personalized to your tastes. The company was founded by Harvard Undergrads. Our Grand Prize Winner was Loro Co. Loro is a companion product for the disabled in wheelchairs allowing users to navigate safely and communicate effectively. We're really proud to support this incredible company that pushes our sustainability goals and supports underserved communities. The CBE Ventures Initiative could not have been this successful without the support of our hard-working CTLs, Associates, and Analysts. They drove this event and ensured that it ran smoothly and successfully. We can't wait to do this again next year. We know we can improve our event with the feedback we've received and hope to continue to serve the Harvard Community. Until then, venture on.

The company's first launch failed completely. So did the next three. Its revenue was $200 per week. Since it was a tech company, the founders tried to figure out how to alter the user interface to increase click-through rates and optimize the search engine results. It did no good. Luckily, an external mentor brought a change of perspective, and he told them, "the photos of the rental apartments your company is listing are dreadful. Buy a camera, fly to New York, and go photograph the apartments yourselves." "This is ridiculous," they said, "it won't work, but even if it does, it won't scale. We can't photograph every house." But surprisingly, the cross-country photography trip doubled revenue, and everyone knows the rest of the story. This is the story of Airbnb (as told by co-founder Joe Gebbia here and here), and it is a great example of how we can become wedded to a paradigm, a way of looking at problems, and eventually only think along those lines. We find a best idea, and we cannot let go if it. As Gebbia himself admits, "The reason [for the first four failures]…is that we had this Silicon Valley mentality that you had to solve problems in a scalable way because that’s the beauty of code…our first session with Paul Graham at Y Combinator...[he] gave us permission to do things that don’t scale and...it changed the trajectory of the business." Whether it's believing that the code is the panacea or some other firmly-held belief, we often close off potential solutions without even considering them. Avoiding this pitfall is highly stressed in Design Thinking (DT), an approach to design used by firms like IDEO (their clients include Apple, Bank of America, and the like) and companies like IBM and BMW. DT provides a methodology that unleashes creativity and finds effective solutions because it breaks down traditional ways of thinking. And so at its core, this post is about thinking, specifically about how our normal method of thinking can limit us. I attended a K-12 school that introduced DT in early elementary school and gave us access to a DT-themed maker space, so I’ve been using it my whole life. For me, the principle of deferring judgment when ideating is one of the most useful Design Thinking techniques. Deferring judgment means not disparaging any ideas as unworthy and not becoming wedded to any ideas either. Overall, DT encourages challenging our held assumptions. We have these assumptions because they work most of the time, but great ideas sometimes live outside the realm of “most.” In my experience teaching Design Thinking to everyone from young kids to Stanford graduate students, I found that the thing that people from all different backgrounds and ages struggle with the most is letting go of their ideas. “I'm done” and “I’m not going to come up with a better idea” are quite common retorts, but it's important to remember that great ideas can sound crazy at first and vice versa. To highlight an IDEO project, the firm was tasked with developing a banking platform for Bank of America. Instead of sticking with the banking industry's best ideas and conventional wisdom, they targeted extreme users who were historically unbanked by rolling out a debit card that rounded purchases to the dollar and added the change to a savings account—and the program has banked 2 billion dollars. Returning to the story of Airbnb, one might object that while the crazy photography idea worked once, it was a lucky break, not a scalable solution. I would point you to Airbnb's photography assistance program and for smaller listers their photography guide. Just because the initial idea doesn't sound easily expandable doesn't always mean we should write it off as such. It's important to say that one need not always follow this mindset in a structured fashion. Instead, it’s a useful mentality to be able to switch to. Most disciplines involve some facet of creative problem solving and design, and it's important to defer judgment there. I'll add that Airbnb has integrated this principle into their organization. Gebbia says, "Anytime somebody comes to me with something, my first instinct when I look at it is to think bigger...Come back to me when you've thought about that times 100. Show me what that looks like." And so don't take it from me, take it from an Airbnb Co-Founder. Your best idea is not always your best. Alexander Chin is a Case Team Leader for CBE and a Sophomore studying Mathematics and Computer Science.

Harvard Undergraduate Consulting on Business and the Environment. Since CBE’s founding a decade ago, our organization has worked towards helping organizations—from Boston startups to transnational Fortune 50 companies—rethink their approaches to business and the environment. When I joined CBE during the fall of my freshman year, I had some consulting experience but was drawn to the organization for its focus on the environment and the unique opportunity it provides students to improve the world, one business at a time. Over the past year, as CBE has expanded, our fields of focus have shifted, and what was once a focus on “the environment” has become a wider focus on sustainability. Sustainability, broadly defined as “the ability to be maintained at a certain rate or level," is often thought to just relate to the sustainability of the Earth’s environment and its more narrow definition of “avoidance of the depletion of natural resources in order to maintain an ecological balance." In reality however, there are many facets to sustainability, including the environment, industry, energy, community, and more. Since I joined CBE, almost every project I have worked on has focused on a different, yet equally important, aspect of sustainability. Here are just a few examples: Sustainable community — developing a business plan for a local arts nonprofit that was built on strengthening and drawing skills from the community that they were in the process of building. Sustainable industry — conducting global market research for a rapidly growing energy storage technology company, focused on finding viable industry partners for product production. Sustainable energy — creating a market entry strategy to inform the actions of a clean energy company interested in expanding into a new market. Sustainable business — working alongside the executive board to ensure CBE remains a sustainable enterprise that has a lasting positive impact on the local and global community, environment, society, and economy—through the development of initiatives such as our sustainability grant and student financial aid program. Each of these projects exemplify our commitment as an organization to taking a broad view of sustainability, engaging with casework that has a real world positive impact, and integrating sustainable best practices into all of our operations. Despite this diversification, efforts to sustain the environment remain at the heart of our organization’s mission. With our recent creation of the Executive Board position of Director of Sustainability, Harvard Undergraduate CBE has reaffirmed its commitment to ensuring that sustainable practices and ideas permeate all of our cases, to the benefit of both our clients and our world. Harvard Undergraduate CBE can help improve your company’s approach to sustainability—from business to the environment.

One question we lose sleep over at CBE is What are we here for? It’s easy amidst the blur of client-facing project work to lose sight of our higher-level mission and goals, both as a Harvard club and as an organization operating within many larger communities on and off campus. Since our founding ten years ago, CBE has been an organization committed simultaneously to innovation and sustainability. Even while consulting for industry giants like General Electric and Boeing, we have developed strategy for some of the most exciting environmental startups in Boston—from cloud-based clean water suppliers to solar energy accessibility nonprofits. My first case team at CBE worked with Cambrian Innovation—a young, ambitious biogas renewable energy producer and an increasingly impactful presence in Boston. Today, however, we have a responsibility to push harder and go further for sustainability than merely our casework. Amidst other factors, the work we do, the political climate in which we operate, and the city where we’re based have put the organization in a unique position to begin living up to our mission—and have given us a duty to do so. This summer, we’re incredibly excited to announce the first-ever CBE Sustainability Grant Program. Over the past several weeks, we have selected fifteen local nonprofits, student groups, and research initiatives to receive a collective $10,000 in funding for environmental initiatives to be completed in the next year. Among them are the Harvard-based Refresh Bolivia organization—which is building clean water and public health infrastructure for communities in Cochabamba, Bolivia—the Haitian Vision Foundation, and our own Engineers Without Borders team. You can check out our profiles on our partner projects here. Some of these initiatives—like that of BubbleBox and James Niffenegger—focus on developing new technology to facilitate sustainable development or aid important conservation efforts, both here in the United States and in emerging economies abroad. Others—like the Harvard Democrats and Students for Carbon Dividends—are centered, although from different perspectives, on the equally vital task of bringing policy awareness to the environmental issues our country faces. But all are dedicated to one overarching objective: environmentally sustainable development. We at CBE envision a future in which high-growth private sector groups and committed policy efforts work together to prove that human development does not need to mean environmental destruction. On a practical level, we also aim to show the greater Harvard community that social responsibility can no longer be a side thought for groups in our position. Our privilege and profitability demand leadership for the communities in which we operate, and it’s a call that we must not refuse. My inner Marvel fanboy is reminded of a certain Spider-Man line… To all our exceptional grant recipients, congratulations. You have CBE’s full commitment and support in all your environmental endeavors. And to our blog readers: if you’re not already working towards sustainable development in your own communities, it might be time to get started. We don’t have much time, and the world is waiting.

Curious and yearning eyes staring unwaveringly back at me, and the eager voices of underclassmen piping up to ask me how “CBE used to be back in the day.” I’ve grown accustomed to scenes like this one. I’m sort of the oldest member of the organization, the eldest if you will: the old-timer, the golden-ager – essentially, the grandfather. So it’s no coincidence that when the organization’s youngin’s learn that I’ve been around for a whopping two-and-a-half years, they flood me with questions about how CBE has changed over the years. Needless to say, I’m flattered when they don’t know or find out. However what I’ve taken from my observations, and consequentially attempted to pass along to our youth, is one major theme: supportive culture never goes out of style. The projects that we work on, the clients we collaborate with, and the intensity of cases we undertake have no doubt increased in magnitude and intensity over the years. But one thing has maintained steady, and that is the spirit of mentorship and passion for support that pervades the organization. It is a spirit and passion for ensuring that every member has a voice, feels connected to fellow members, is supported and bolstered in her professional and sustainability-related pursuits, and most of all, feels at home in the organization. I’ve heard too many horror stories of organizations and their leadership failing as entities to foster a healthy atmosphere. No organization is ever established for the purposes of being “toxic” or riddled by nepotism and foul play among members, but far too often, organizations lose sight of creating an inclusive environment beyond the barriers of entering the organization, and based upon testimonials of countless friends, those that suffer most are the broader membership. Largely over the past two years, CBE’s Boards and its leaders have worked to instill a greater sense of community and engagement within and outside of the organization. To make members feel welcome, included, and invested in the club’s growth has been our recipe for success. It is a virtuous cycle that keeps on giving and perhaps the only sustainable way to ensure that generations of members beyond our own will not falter as pre-professional organizations before us have. So whenever the young lads ask me how CBE used to be, I will tell them about how the nature of work has changed, but I will also tell them about how the supportive culture they cherish in CBE has always existed in some form or fashion. That, I know, will never go out of style. Jeff Cott is the Chief Financial Officer for CBE, and is a senior at Harvard studying Economics and Government.

I could not stand them growing up, and until recently, I still cringed at the mere sight of a cobweb. I did not care how cool Spider-Man looked swinging from building to building in New York City; I just knew that spider silk and I did NOT mix. What I did not realize at the time was that the superficial ability of harnessing oneself from a skyscraper was in fact a play on spider silk’s novel properties. Spider silk is an elastic and sticky material that is composed of viscoelastic glue-like glycoproteins surrounded by an aqueous solution [1]. It’s molecular makeup results in a material with a ridiculous amount of tensile strength, rivaling high-grade steel and fibers like Kevlar, which is used in bulletproof vests [2]. While researchers are still working on identifying viable ways to harvest the silk in large amounts, spider silk has begun to inspire innovative medical advices, adhesives, artificial implants, textiles and even automobile parts. Now if spiders are still not your favorite organism, I encourage you to consider butterfly wings and their sheen, which has inspired color displays for e-readers or geckos, which have sticky feet that are ideal for adhesive design [3]. If you are a plant fanatic, read up on lotus leaves, which repel water so well that they are beginning to inspire the improvement of windshields and may even render them obsolete [4]. Our very own environment is fostering bio-inspired design in ways that are revolutionizing the biotechnology industry! Bioinspiration is economically promising, sustainable and innovative. In a bit over 10 years, bioinspired innovation will account for over 400 billion dollars in the United States’ GDP [5]. Better yet, bioinspiration often offers the ingenuity needed to create novel solutions to many of the world’s problems. For companies to remain cutting-edge and financially viable, I encourage you to explore the living world around us, as it may just be the reason why you can create the world's next big invention. Harvard CBE can help your company understand your product strategy in the context of your competitors. Augusta Uwamanzu-Nna is a Managing Director for CBE, and a junior at Harvard studying Bioengineering.

Identifying how well a tech product is doing can get pretty complicated. It's impossible to know exactly what the developer is thinking and what their next move will be. Nevertheless, there are a lot of hints that they may drop along the way. Here are five ways that we can try to uncover product strategy without having insider knowledge. 1. Marketing Messaging This one is fairly obvious. A company will give away a lot of information through its marketing messaging. It gives away what they're most proud of and, more importantly, what they think will sell. Their website, Twitter, sales deck, etc. will all demonstrate this clearly. Companies will want to sell on their competitive advantage, sure, but they also want to pivot the consumer mindset towards the direction the product wants to go. Twitter, as a company, is a fantastic example of this. While they categorize themselves as a News organization, and one of their biggest competitive advantages is the ability to connect millions of strangers quickly, they market themselves as a haven for television/video engagement. A majority of their recent messaging has been surrounding driving viewers to television or video streaming on Twitter's platform. While Twitter's users may primarily use Twitter for news or communication, the platform wants to move towards user engagement via video streaming, and so it markets itself as that. 2. Customer Targeting With its messaging, a company will also give away who its trying to target. It'll tell you what demographics, what kinds of companies, what geographies, etc. they're trying to target. This can help determine a lot of different factors about the product direction. Companies will generally try to shift in the direction that the customers are trying to shift in. They will build features based on them and tailor their product for them. For SMBs, the product will shift towards potentially being cheaper, more flexible, and easier to launch. For large enterprises, products will become more feature heavy, customizable, and service-heavy. Returning to the example of Twitter, it's clear that Twitter is trying to target B2C organizations worldwide with its video advertising strategies, marketing how many users it has access to and conversion rates for various industries. It markets how it can tap into specific demographics and can provide data to inform strategy development. This demographic, while broad, is very specific: Twitter wants to pull companies that would otherwise advertise on TV to Twitter. This tells us that Twitter will push its product to behave like a video platform, offering video ads frequently in Twitter feeds and expanding its streaming capabilities. 3. Revenue Breakdowns Looking at where the money comes from also can help understand a company's direction. Breaking down their revenue streams, as much as possible, helps identify which parts of their products are the most valuable and which are growing. By extension, understanding where most of the expenditure goes can provide similar information. Companies will want to sustain products and features that drive growth and bring in revenue. Thus, products that bring in large amounts of revenue will be driving factors, or, products with a lot of investment are big bets for the company to drive growth. For Twitter, as with any social media, it's all about advertisers, while data sales represent a swiftly growing, but small (< 10%) segment of their revenue. Advertising also primarily comes from "Promoted Tweets" and "MoPub" or mobile publishing, which of course includes the video advertising segment. They've begun to reduce their losses with layoffs, although their ad revenues have fallen. Their shift to video ads also makes sense as they claim that user engagement rises from video advertising and that costs per user are cheaper for video ads. So, they will push further into video advertising for this reason. And, since data sales have been consistently growing, they may also push those tools. 4. Market Share and Market Share Growth Understanding which markets a company has a share in can be pivotal to understanding its audiences. Again, companies will drive their products towards their audiences to solidify their bases, and will also attempt to push out into certain markets they don't have a base in. So, understanding market share and their previous growth strategies can help identify future growth plans. Aside from Facebook and Instagram, Twitter has the highest reach in the 18-34 demographic as well as in multiple platforms. However, its usage is low, with users logging in infrequently and for short periods of time. Thus, Twitter will likely try to push in two directions: 1) towards solidifying and expanding its base in the "millennial" demographic; 2) towards improving user engagement to hook users in and keep them there. This strategy may play into their growth as a video and news platform and may be part of the reason why they switch from a chronological home feed to a recommendation engine based feed. 5. Features and Feature Development Companies are generally acutely aware of what their products' capabilities are and what they aren't. They'll want to make sure they're a step ahead of their customers by building innovative features and identifying market trends that they want to stay on top of. At the same time, they'll try to ensure that they offer the same features that any direct market competitor has. If a company is developing out features that other products offer, its clear that that company is trying to push into that market. So, it's easy to tell where a company is going based on what features its developing out. Stepping away from Twitter, a classic example is Instagram Stories. Within a few months, more people were using Instagram Stories than were ever using Snapchat. This idea, which they very directly lifted from Snapchat, was both polished and improved in the Instagram version. This clearly means that Instagram is pushing towards expanding its messaging features, which are still fairly lackluster. This was proven when they also launched video calling at F8 this year. Their growth strategy is towards turning Snapchat into a direct competitor and then dominating that market. Understanding a competitor's product strategy can help you focus your own strategy to either align yourself with theirs or compete with it. Harvard CBE can help your company understand your product strategy in the context of your competitors. Dhruv Gupta is a Managing Director for CBE, and a junior at Harvard studying Computer Science and Government.

When you're building out a product, it can get really hard to understand what the actual problems are with your product. There's a sense of ownership that's hard to get away from, making criticism often feel sharp and bitter. But, the customer is always right. And, for relatively established software products, big or small, finding feedback online is totally feasible. Getting user feedback comes down to understanding what developers want. Ultimately, unless you're in consulting, the software developers are going to decide whether to use your product or not. This is true whether you're working with white label products, microservices, or even B2C applications. The real technical feedback for your product will come from your users – developers. Ultimately, developers are going to decide whether to use your product or not. Here are 5 places you can look to check the pulse of developers: 1. Blogs Blogs and news media are an absolutely fantastic place to get detailed information. And, they're usually the second place users go after your product's website. They Google search " reviews" and click on the first five links. Let's take Docker as an example (disclaimer: they have not been a client, to-date). Check out this article on Infoworld. The article divides up into the "Good" and "Bad" about Docker, quoting CEOs and developers who use Docker and build a case for and against Docker. Potential Docker customers are going to come to this website, skim through it, and look at some of the key terms. They'll see that it's called simple and has great developer support. But, they'll also see that implementing it can be complicated and it's not really versatile for diverse workloads. A developer is going to look at these reviews and try to fit their own company/needs in there. So, it's really valuable to look at these blogs and understand the messaging that the blogs are putting out so you can tackle it head on. 2. Github Github is both a haven for developers as well as the bane of their existence. As a software developer myself, Github has both saved me and screwed me in the past. But, as a product developer, Github Issues are where you look to hope that someone else had the same problem you did so that you can try the solution they found. It's also where developers can suggest features and complain about problems. Let's take the example of Docker again. Their Github page for their CLI has, currently, 167 open issues and 151 closed issues. It's not a bad ratio, but it means that they do get their fair share of complaints. Of course, it is also an open-source project, which means that they've got a great amount of merged pull requests too. So, they're obviously active on Github, which means that they're understanding where their customers are coming from head on. Their project gets live feedback as developers encounter problems. That's a huge benefit of open-sourcing parts of your product. Even if you don't open-source the core product, savvy developers will build APIs on top of your products, which will let you get feedback through them. 3. StackOverflow StackOverflow is the ultimate source for a developer's pain. It's the first link we click on when we have problems, the first place we cry our hearts out, the first home for a lot of my code (I promise I'm a good developer). If your product is tagged on StackOverflow, that's not a bad thing! It means that users are making an active effort to use your product. It helps you gauge community support and understand what problems consumers are facing. Let's go back to Docker. Docker's got about 39,000 questions about it, indicating an active community of users. A lot of top-voted questions are about understanding what Docker does, some of its configuration tools, and performance comparisons. Unlike Github, it's a fantastic place to understand the both lower level technical issues and higher level issues with your product. StackOverflow also helps you understand your community of developers, providing you with an insight into how active and useful they are. 4. Reddit Reddit, the homepage of the internet, is a great place to keep track of the high level thoughts that people have about your product. It's not usually the first place users will go, but, again, it's a great place to understand your community. People will use Reddit to discuss future steps, compare products, and get technical help. It's more of a discussion forum than any of the other previously mentioned websites. Docker has its own subreddit, where users can discuss topics. A lot of the posts are asking for help or are comparing different products. Reddit is also a great place to judge what people think about your products and announcements. For example, Docker announcing native Kubernetes support was received with a lot of fanfare. 5. Twitter Twitter is where you go to look at memes about your product. Look up "#". It's also where developers complain and exclaim about your product at a more personal level, just like Reddit. They'll discuss problems and frustrations, and tweet about successes and meetups. In Docker's case, users share articles and memes, discuss their product tech stacks, and post pictures of conferences where they heard about Docker. Having an active Twitter is a great way to engage your community, and following your products' Twitter hashtags is a great way to pick up what your customers feel about your product. Conclusion Once you can grasp where the developers are coming from, you can start pitching to them much more granularly and pivot towards their needs. Remember, potential customers are going to go to your website first. You can leverage this by taking the feedback you've garnered and hook them in, so they go to the other sources more informed. Successful companies listen to their customers while simultaneously innovating in their own rights. Harvard CBE can help your company understand your product strategy in the context of your competitors. Dhruv Gupta is a Managing Director for CBE, and a junior at Harvard studying Computer Science and Government.