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Levitt Center lab to inspire social innovation

By Meghan O’Sullivan ’15 & Eren Shultz ’15

What does it take to start a business or to grow an innovative strategy to solve a long-standing problem? Instead of looking at the corporate sector, Hamilton alumnus Alon Hillel-Tuch ’07 is a part of the wave of young millennials who have abandoned Wall Street in favor of social-welfare based work–in Alon’s case, social entrepreneurship. As reported by American Public Media’s Marketplace, “Today’s students want jobs that have meaning to them. That can mean non-profits, but not necessarily…Tech companies and startups are scooping up many who might have gone to Wall Street.” Hillel-Tuch is a living example of this growing trend. Being a Co-Founder and the CFO of the crowdfunding platform RocketHub, Hillel-Tuch works to help connect “artists, academics, and entrepreneurs with their fans and brands through the power of crowdfunding.” For those of us who haven’t stepped into a Kickstarter or RocketHub campaign yet, crowdfunding is, quite simply, a way to connect many people (each having small amounts of capital) to a person or project in need of support, allowing those who may not be part of a major investment group to still participate in the growth of promising entrepreneurs and campaigns.

Social innovation has become the backbone of Hillel-Tuch’s work. RocketHub’s approach “allows people to participate in companies, not the public market” or, simply put, “Democratizing access to capital.” Yet the company’s mission to be a socially-grounded organization runs deeper than its external work. Inside RocketHub, “We hire people more based on emotional intelligence than on having a specific skill set,” because, as Hillel-Tuch stated, “you can teach a technical skill set, but it’s very difficult to learn emotional intelligence.” Using empathy and innovative strategy as guiding ideals in the workplace, Hillel-Tuch and the RocketHub community help organizations in both the public and private sector (from the Department of State and the White House to Goldman Sachs) accomplish their missions more efficiently and effectively through the use of RocketHub’s socially-grounded products and services.

On a broader scale, Hillel-Tuch sees crowdfunding as one method of social empowerment. Before performing new initiatives his team predicts where the market will be in several years and plans their intellectual property right and communication frameworks accordingly—in order to “disrupt the market and innovate.” Forbes  magazine reiterated Hillel-Tuch’s crowdfunding ideology, advocating it as a “powerful force…pumping small businesses with desperately needed lifeblood” while also “encouraging entrepreneurs to continue creating even in the face of these slow times.”

At Hamilton, Hillel-Tuch studied Economics and Chinese, both of which have provided him with valuable experience in his current position. However, he emphasized that it is not the specific skills he learned, but “utilizing many skills through a multidimensional approach” that has been most valuable in his career. He said, “This is what the Hamilton education truly prepared me for.” In giving advice to current students, Hillel-Tuch advocated “taking classes you’re interested and engaged in, and taking risks—try things out, fail and learn.” With only three out of ten new businesses that start every year surviving out the decade, students can take risks on the Hill that might not be possible after graduating, and can utilize the safety net of the college to better develop their problem-solving approaches prior to implementing ideas in the workforce.  The Levitt Center’s new emphasis on Social Innovation—namely the Social Innovation Fellows Program, Innovation Fridays and the recent remodeling of the back of the Levitt Center to create the Social Innovation Lab—is designed to broaden and strengthen this safety net.

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