Observing this session brought back memories of standing before a VC panel earlier this month and pitching our entrepreneurship business projects  – today’s panel of reviewers was equally impressive but also more oriented towards providing support than picking an idea to shreds.  I want to highlight two particularly interesting projects that came up and the comments offered to them as they move forward.

The first project was a Philippine art-related NGO that sells local artwork and incorporates the artwork into its publication of children’s books. They want to introduce their books into the global market while still maintaining their core mission of leveraging the arts to promote social justice. This struck me as a perfect business consulting project as the organization is really confronting standard questions of distribution, global expansion and brand equity. The quality of existing books is really quite impressive, so the foundation is strong to take a valuable product to a global market. Two themes the panel recommended the organization to consider, which would help any organization considering global expansion are:

1. identifying global thematic topics that will translate readily to an international market, and
2. establishing licensing partnerships with museums around the world as another distribution outlet for the artwork and book sales.

The other project that really blew me away with its creativity was a person who is introducing superhero comic books in Kuwait. The idea is to create a figure similar to Spiderman that would fit more readily into an Islamic context and be utilized to promote pluralism and multi-cultural acceptance.  The challenge, however, is to separate the success of the business with the fear of some investors/distributors of playing in an Islamic cultural space. The panel recommended that the entrepreneur identify a Stephen Spielberg-type of “godfather” who can promote their concept to the larger media companies while protecting the content that’s so important to the project’s mission. That will take a lot of time and energy to cultivate individual relationships but in the long-term may help protect the project’s value..