ECSEL FELLOWS 2010

These 30 outstanding individuals were selected from among over eight hundred applicants to the ECSEL Program in 2010.  They will attend a weeklong program in the United States in April 2010 to learn directly from successful social entrepreneurs, investors, and business leaders about how they can implement their ideas for new businesses and social enterprises in China.  They come from across China but represent the top universities across the country.  Their interests and ages vary but they are unified by their passion to use new business models to impact social and environmental challenges in China.  

Chen Zhuo

Originally from Lanzhou in the Gansu Province in western China, Chen Zhuo is majoring in Engineering at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.  By 2015, an estimated 20 million people will die annually from cardiovascular disease.  It is a critical health problem, where the current monitoring solutions are often too expensive for low-income populations.  Chen Zhuo has developed a low-cost heart monitoring system to meet this need.

Cheng Ying Kai

Urban food waste is a large contributor to the problem of filled landfills in Hong Kong. Along with partners, Cheng Ying Kai is in the process of launching a social enterprise to create fertilizer out of urban food waste. This project won the Hong Kong Social Enterprise Challenge with Cheng Ying Kai’s leadership. He is currently pursuing his Bachelor of Business Administration at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

He Kelly

He Kelly is from Qingdao, China and graduated from the University of New South Wales. After graduation, Kelly worked for a hedge fund in Australia and is now in China completing MBA studies at the Cheung Kong Graduate Business School.  Kelly is exploring creating outdoor camps for middle-class urban children, allowing them to experience life outside China’s busy cities while also creating the infrastructure to provide health care to rural children in these locations.   

Hu Po

Hu Po is a senior student majoring in chemistry at Peking University, China. Po has participated in various part-time and internship programs at IBM Global Services, Boston Consulting Group, Bain & Company and Bohai Securities. His experience and knowledge in chemistry as well as business have enabled him to attempt to address alcoholism in China with a non-alcoholic health beverage based on traditional Chinese medicine.

Huang Haichen

Born and raised in Shanghai, Huang Haichen studied Management Science at the Fudan University and now is pursuing his MBA at the China Europe International Business School. He has worked as a senior analyst for Jefferey’s & Co, focusing on the renewable energy sector. Huang Haichen plans to create an industrial design company that focuses on Building-Integrated Photovoltaics.

Jah Ying Chung

Jah Ying Chung is from Hong Kong and is the youngest of three siblings, which she says has taught her to follow her own path even when it diverges from a traditional one.  She is majoring in International Business and Global Management at the University of Hong Kong, where she is a senior and has started the social enterprise club.  But instead of interning at international banks like her peers, she has worked at Social Ventures Hong Kong, a venture philanthropy organization, and Civic Exchange, a think tank where she researched asylum issues in Hong Kong.  She has herself begun an effort called Kitchen on Wheels, which will train and employ people from marginalized groups to provide healthful culinary training to middle class households.   
 
Jingqi Zhang

Jingqi Zhang is a senior at the Dalian University of Technology, where she is majoring in International Economics and has been the vice president of the student union.  There are 8.7 million disabled people in China, including millions who are victims of polio.  During the past year she has worked with the inventor of an affordable walking aid for the disabled to commercialize and mass-produce this product, managing the business aspects of the endeavor.  She has worked with the Dalian Disabled Persons’ Federation to understand and evaluate customer needs, and her team was awarded second place in national Students in Free Enterprise competition.  

Johnny Jiang

Johnny grew up in remote Western China, and experienced the pervasive and ruinous effects of rural poverty firsthand. Many family-run enterprises in rural China resist expanding due to the unaffordable risk involved: if they go broke, there is no social safety net to catch them. Yet, unless they invest in their operations, they will be unable to escape from poverty. With insurance, the families are provided with the emotional and fiscal security they need to expand. Johnny is exploring ways to provide insurance policies that cover production-related investments. He is in the process of creating a pilot project aimed at proving to major providers that this class of insurance is viable.  Johnny is pursuing his MBA at the China Europe International Business School in Shanghai.

Ju Xiaozhou

Ju Xiaozhou is a senior at Peking University, where she is majoring in Finance.  She considers the harbor cities of Hamburg, Germany and Shanghai to be hometowns, which has given her “the soul of a sailor, a longing for freedom, and a good understanding of different cultures.”  She has been accepted to Harvard Business School’s 2+2 program and is planning to attend HBS after two years of work experience.  With a friend who has worked in the biomass energy industry, she is exploring urban biogas as both a waste management and clean energy business opportunity.   

Wang Jun

Wang Jun is a Masters student in Finance Engineering at the School of Economics at Xiamen University in Fujian, China.  With a partner, he has worked with a team of engineers to write the business plan for a technology that utilizes waste heat in cars to increase their fuel efficiency. The technology has been tested among cost-sensitive taxi drivers who pay careful attention to fuel efficiency.  This team is currently working with auto manufacturers to explore the commercialization of the technology.
 
Kuang Jing

Kuang Jing is a senior majoring in Finance at Peking University. Originally from the Guizhou Province, she has studied abroad at Harvard University and interned at McKinsey and Bain. These experiences have contributed to Jing Kuang’s professional skills and leadership ability. She has recently led a team in the development of a web-based platform for recycling electronics and electrical appliances. This social enterprise collects discarded products for recycling or proper disposal. Users are also encouraged to send unwanted electronics to rural areas, where they are directed to under-served schools and children.   

Lee Ka Lun (Clive)

During the Sichuan earthquake, over 90% of housing was seriously damaged and thousands of villagers lost their employment. Clive and his team have established an enterprise selling fair-trade kiwi fruits from the Sichuan Province. Instead of relying on charitable donations, this will ensure a sustainable source of income to assist the development of this region. To ensure the success of this business, Clive aims to work with local partners to provide training for villagers in best-practice farming procedures. He also plans to structure the enterprise as a cooperative with representatives from the 9 villages in this area. Clive is the founding president of an international NGO that fosters young professional exchange and is a world traveler. He is a University of Hong Kong graduate in Electrical and Electronics and is currently pursuing a Masters of Law there.

Lee Kaya

Lee Kaya is a senior at the Shanghai Institute of Visual Art at Fudan University, where she has majored in product design and participated in a program called Design for the Majority.  She is now working as part of a small cross-cultural design team with Greennovate, a social enterprise in Shanghai with a focus on building value through sustainable thinking.  She is exploring setting up a student design association that would do both commercial and nonprofit design work oriented towards sustainability.

Li Jingyi

Li Jingyi was born in Nanning, China and is deeply motivated by the direct knowledge of extreme poverty and scarcity of resources in her hometown. She carries this awareness with her during her studies in Business Administration at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. She is currently developing a venture that aims to introduce and popularize refined plant-dyes as an organic alternative to industrial, chemical dyes. The plant-dyed clothing project utilizes the natural resources in poverty-stricken minority regions in China as well as the existing mature textile industry in China, while empowering minority communities in a sustainable and profitable way. Li Jingyi has also organized many international volunteering trips and is a representative for the 2010 Harvard University Project for Asian and International Relations.

Li Min

Li Min is a senior majoring in Entrepreneurship Management at Zhejiang University near Shanghai, where she has participated in a range of entrepreneurship organizations and competitions.   She is currently exploring the potential to use online training to expand educational opportunities in technical skills and certifications, starting with training in CAD/CAM/CAE software.  By conducting trainings online, she hopes to reduce the up-front cost required for these trainings and allow a broader range of people in China to access these skills.

Ng Mai Mai (Sarah)

Sarah is passionate about providing a “green roofing” service for organic food production in Hong Kong.  She hopes to target the residential, commercial and industrial buildings in this high-density city with limited land resources. In addition to the positive environment effects of green roofs, this initiative would enable market penetration in the organic food industry of Hong Kong. Sarah is currently majoring in Business Administration at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and has studied abroad at the University of Texas at Austin.  

Zhang Shuai

Zhang Shuai is a junior at Shanghai University of Finance and Economics majoring in Financial Management.  He was born in Qingdao, a coastal city, and has studied abroad in Taiwan.  Zhang is part of the team behind WeCanCompete.com, a website that connects Chinese students with international competitions in a range of subjects, and which is an outreach partner of ECSEL.  He is interested in exploring the potential to create recycling depots in Chinese cities in which people would pre-sort recycling in return for credits for public transit, decreasing waste management costs.

Tang Ching Yan (Tracy)

Tracy is the leader of Click Success, a venture that aims to teach e-business skills to urban handicrafts-women in Tin Shui Wai, a low-income district of Hong Kong.  In partnership with community centers and business organizations, Click Success will provide online retail training and sustainable business skills. Tracy is currently at the University of Hong Kong pursuing her Bachelors of Finance and has studied abroad at UC Davis. She participated in the Social Entrepreneurship Program in Sichuan, China and she is currently managing social ventures with Students in Free Enterprise HKU.

Xia Xiaozhong

Textile and dyeing factories in China discharge toxins in wastewater that, due to its extremely high alkali content, cannot be processed by water treatment facilities. Leading a 10-person team of scientists, engineers and business students, Xia Xiaozhong has worked to commercialize an innovative alkali filter which captures the alkali, both allowing the water to be treated and harvesting the alkali for resale, “turning waste into treasure.” This team has obtained a 500,000 RMB grant from the government to build a demonstration plant and is currently seeking additional investment.  Xia is currently pursuing a Bachelor of Entrepreneurship Management degree at the Zhejiang University near Shanghai.  

Xiao Tingwu

Xiao Tingwu (Amanda) is a senior majoring in Public Administration with a specialty in Public Health at Fudan University in Shanghai. She is from Shanghai and has seen the massive growth that has occurred during her lifetime in that city.  Her parents started a business in 1992, and seeing that business grow has inspired her to be entrepreneurial herself.  She has been the Vice President of Asia-Pacific Student Entrepreneurship Society at Fudan University and with other public health students is tackling the enormous challenge of care for 160 million elderly Chinese without traditional family structures. She has begun working with the Shanghai Social Welfare Association to train and certify unemployed migrant workers to be nursing aides for the elderly, and is currently exploring how to expand this program.

Wang Dan

Wang Dan is an MBA student at Tsinghua University in Beijing, and is originally from Jiangsu Province.  With a business partner, she intends to launch China’s first sustainability-oriented, environmentally conscious clothing brand, called Twenty-Twenties. This spring, their flagship store will open in Beijing, with stores in Shenyang and Dalian launching shortly thereafter. She previously attended Zhangzhou University in Henan Province, and before business school worked in several investment and media firms in Beijing.  

Wenjun Wang

Wenjun Wang is a junior at Renmin University in Beijing, majoring in Marketing.  Working in Shanchung County in Fujian Province, he has explored issues facing citrus farmers with lack of sufficient access to market information.  In response, he and a team have explored and begun to test information services over mobile phones for these farmers.  Wenjun is originally from Yunnan Province and enjoys hiking.  He is currently working as an intern for Mercer Consulting.

Yang Ruo Yun

Yang Ruo Yun is a junior at the Renmin University Business School, where she is majoring in Management Science.   She is originally from Shanghai. Ruo Yun is the coordinator of Youth Business Development – China (YBD China), a social enterprise network now with campus chapters across over 30 universities in Beijing, Shanghai, and elsewhere in China.  YBD China conducts trainings and facilitates the participation of Chinese teams in the social business plan competition held by the Said School of Business at Oxford.  She is currently has a winter internship with UBS Investments in Shanghai and has previously worked with Lenovo and the Center for Social Policy at the Chinese Academy of Social Science.

Zhang Min (Jasmin)

Jasmin is an MBA student at the Cheung Kong School of Business, in their Executive MBA program in Shanghai.  She grew up in Qinghai in the northwest of China, where her mother started a family business when Jasmin was 12.  Her mother’s experiences as well as charity work has impressed on her a broader meaning for success and accomplishment.  With a team at Cheung Kong, she has been working to create a firm focused on biogas and biomass power development in rural areas in China.  

Zhang Yuan (Martha)

Martha is an MBA student at the HSBC School of Business of Peking University in Guangdong, having previously graduated with a degree in economics from Peking University.  She grew up in Ningxia, which as she says “is underdeveloped but has a colorful culture.”  With work experience including the China Everbright Bank and the China ExIm Bank, she hopes to build tools including a peer-to-peer website to support financing, marketing, and business training for artisans and small businesses in the Ningxia region.

Zhao Mingming (Kevin)

Kevin is a junior at the University of International Business and Economics in Beijing, where he is majoring in International Trade and Business.  He played a lead role in bringing the Global Social Venture Competition to China, where he coordinates this competition.  He has also worked in Henan Province to conduct market research and business development for an organization facilitating handicraft work by AIDS widows and orphans as a means for increasing income in this vulnerable population.

Zhao Xiangyu (Shane)

Shane is from the northern Chinese city of Harbin, and he is currently living in Beijing during a year off from Franklin and Marshall University in Pennsylvania.  He has been a leader at the national level in youth efforts on climate change in China, including organizing an international youth conference on clean energy in Beijing in July 2009, coordinating events at over 300 campuses in advance of the UN climate summit in Copenhagen in October 2009, and leading a delegation of several dozen Chinese students that UN meeting in December 2009.  He is currently working with Golden Bridges, an organization in Beijing working to build the philanthropic sector in China, and is currently exploring creating a social innovation center in China modeled off of the co-working model used by The Hub that has taken hold in London and around the world.

Zheng Shuai

Shuai is a junior at Beijing Normal University, where she is majoring in Business Management.  She is originally from Hebei Province, in northern China near Beijing. She is setting up a social enterprise incubator and training program in Beijing, which intends to operate on a self-sufficient basis by promoting scalable, for-profit approaches to social issues.  

Zhou Yingke

Zhou Yingke is a senior majoring in Business Administration at Zhejiang University near Shanghai.  He grew up in Ningbo, where his father runs a small business and has imparted to him the qualities of persistence, innovation, and passion that an entrepreneur must possess.  Yingke has been a leader with AIESEC and with the support of the Temasek Foundation, studied abroad at the National University of Singapore last year.  He is passionate about utilizing waste for composting and recycling to create opportunity in rural areas.

Zhu Lun

Zhu Lun is a junior at Shanghai International Studies University, where he is studying Economics.  His hometown is Wuzhen, a small waterside village in the Jiangnan region, and he comes from a family of educators.  He has previously worked with farmers in Zhejiang Province to recycle crop residues for animal feed, supported the development of export markets for a wool embroidery cooperative for unemployed women workers, and assisted in a youth center for migrant workers’ families.  Most recently, he initiated a business mentorship program for students in Shanghai. He is currently exploring a transportation service aimed at students at universities in Shanghai that would serve as a bridge to legal status for currently illegal/unregistered informal transport drivers.