I worked on the business development team to perform market research and identify opportunities in markets in the United States and India. Since the organization is looking to launch in these markets, my project helped them understand the competitive landscape. I performed customer discovery interviews and presented a business model canvas as my final deliverable. Major discoveries for the team were: 1) value proposition of the company useful for the market; 2) probable revenue sources; and 3) risk factors.

Without the MBA degree, I could not have successfully collected the relevant data, nor could I have prepared the business model danvas. Some challenges I faced included:
- Since the internship was online, I could not see the tech for which I was hired. So, it took me some time to understand exactly what the organization wanted me to accomplish.
- Scheduling interviews with the right people became challenging because of the COVID-19 lockdowns.

I realized the value of a solution first/hypothesis-based methodology to solve a business problem and the importance of focus in organizations in the social sector. For example, I found that my team was trying to find every problem under the sun that can be targeted with their tech and then solve as many of those problems as they can. Though this looks like a very novel approach with good intentions, it is quite difficult to have a sizeable impact with this because (1) discovering all the problems in any sector/industry takes a lot of time and research and (2) targeting a wide range of issues with a versatile idea/tech will rarely lead to a large impact. Since my team consisted of PhDs, their approach to business was quite like the way research is done rather than the way a company is run. Despite the difficulties, I convinced them to develop hypotheses about use cases of their tech and to conduct the market research accordingly. This method did yield some important data points about the market’s needs.