Tokyo Tech Visionary Project is a compulsory subject for the first-year students at Tokyo Tech. It encourages self-discovery and aims to motivate students to set individual goals so that they can envision their own path throughout the four years of engineering studies at the undergraduate level. The course alternates between lectures and group work. Throughout the course, students will listen to some talks about the non-engineering field that have not been encountered yet. It takes importance on the development of personality, sociability and creativity. It also allows students to identify, scrutinize, and convey problems, enhancing the interactive set of skills needed for efficient communication and presentation.
After learning and discussing about teamwork and education issues, the 4th lecture about Social Entrepreneurship was given by Prof. Naoya Abe with the objective of exploring the critical thinking and sociological thinking skills of the students. The lecture was held last April 28, 2016 at the Ishikawadai Bldng. 6, at the Creative Commons Center, followed by a group discussion session held on May 2, 2016.
1. Lecture
At first, Prof. Naoya Abe made a self-introduction and told some stories of his life. For example, a story when he was in the United States struggling in Cornell University for his doctoral degree, he had to take care of his new born twin babies at the final year of his study. He almost failed his Ph.D., but he did not give up, and finally managed to graduate smoothly. “Never give up” was the message he wanted the students to remember during their study in Tokyo Tech.
Before explaining about the concept
of Social Entrepreneurship, Abe showed to the students some major social problems we are facing right now, such as poverty, hunger, and energy crisis. He compared the electricity consumption per year between New York State, US and Sub-Saharan, Africa. It is reported in the literature that the New York City (about 19.5 million people) consumes about 40 TWh electritcy, which is roughly the same quantity as that consumed in the Sub-Saharan countries (about 791 million people). In other word, electricity consumption per capita for the New York City is about 2.050 kWh, while that of the Sub-Saharan Countries is only about 52 kWh. This big gap reflected how desperate the lack of electricity problem is in the world, and at the same time became one of the greatest challenge to solve. Then, Abe emphasized the importance of sustainable development as the key success to have a sustainable impact to the society. He showed some of his works in developing an electrical power supply system at Pangan-an island, in the Philippines.
The concept of social entrepreneurship was then introduced
to the students. It is considered as one of the effective methods for creating a sustainable development. In social entrepreneurship concept, a company makes some money not for the sake of profit. The money obtained will be used again to maintain the company to run on its own budget independently, and to make some quality improvements or to scale-up the scope in the future. Although it faces many challenges such as from the competition with commercial company, social entrepreneurship could answer the needs of voluntary based activities with their independent financing system.
“When you give a man a fish you can feed him for a day, but if you teach him how to fish you feed him for a lifetime”, Abe explained. This is one of the important principles he introduced in making a sustainable development project.
2. Group Work
The group work was held on May 2nd.
The class was divided into three groups, each group having 4-5 members each. All of the students had their chance to share what they have written on their reflection note. Then, they were asked to write the summary of the discussion and then their response, or thoughts and opinion on a round paper called the “entakun”.
Below is the picture of the entakun papers from 3 groups where the students freely wrote their thoughts, and some did some drawings as well.
Overall, the students found the lecture very interesting and insightful. Some of them even set their own goal to built a company based on the social entrepreneurship concept.
Yes, we believe you can make it! Let’s contribute to the society!
Speaker’s Profile:
Naoya Abe is an associate professor at the Department of Transdisciplinary Science and Engineering, Tokyo Institute of Technology, Japan. He holds both Ph.D. in Applied Economics and Management (Environmental Economics) and MS in Regional Science from Cornell University, both M.E and Bachelor degrees in Social Engineering from Tokyo Tech. When he was at Cornell, he received Fulbright Scholarship and the World Bank scholarship. Before joining Tokyo Tech, he had been at the National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES) in Tsukuba, Japan as a post-doctoral fellow. His research areas include environmental economics and applied economics, covering the topics of water source protection, clean-up of dumped wastes, New Public Management (NPM), and environmental statistics. He also had worked at the Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund (OECF) and consequently the Japan Bank for International Cooperation (JBIC), a Japanese government’s foreign-aid and financial institution, where he had the opportunities of working with multinationals people both in Japan and the partner countries such as Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Myanmar, and the Philippines.
Written by Farid Triawan