Products of progress
Back in 2009, alumna Jodie Wu ’09 launched Global Cycle Solutions (GCS) in Tanzania to bring small-scale farmers an innovative product she designed in MIT’s Development Lab (D-Lab): a bike-mounted maize sheller. Easily attached to a bike and powered by pedaling, the low-cost, cast-iron sheller allowed farmers to process their corn 10 times faster — in one day, as opposed to weeks when done by hand. The sheller could also be shared among a number of farms. By 2011, GCS had sold shellers to more than 1,000 farmers. But its products still weren’t moving fast enough to fund product development, marketing, and sales. Sensing the startup’s danger of decline, the GCS board gave Wu an ultimatum: “They said, ‘You have to choose [research and development] or distribution — you can’t do both.’” From this arose an entirely new, and more efficient, business model. Knowing that about 82 percent of Tanzanians — more than 35 million...