Carlson students use business principles to help MedShare, a non-profit organization, deliver life-saving medical supplies to countries that need them most.

Great ideas have the potential to change the world—as long as they’re implemented well. Ten years ago, two Atlanta men founded MedShare with the idea of solving two problems at once: collecting surplus medical supplies from American hospitals that would otherwise clog landfills and delivering them to underserved populations around the world. By 2006, the organization was shipping $35 million of supplies around the world, helping improve health care in more than two dozen countries. It was also saving many tons of medical supplies from going to waste. The idea was still great, but implementation had gotten far more challenging.

Global supply chains and complicated logistics required more sophisticated plans. When the MedShare arrived at Georgia Tech to share their story for Intersections MBA Case Competition in January, they were looking for guidance from the seven teams that had arrived from business schools around the country. They hoped to find better ways to integrate good business practices with good works.

The Carlson School of Management sent Adrienne Peirce, Dave Frohn, David Roland, and Vijay Nangia from its Net Impact group, an organization that focuses on ethics, sustainability and leadership in business to represent the school. Dave Frohn, one of the group’s members, says they had to address two key areas for MedShare. “We needed to determine how to grow MedShare’s presence and find ways to leverage the sustainability aspect of the company,” he says.

Over the course of just a few hours, the group discussed the obstacles and potential solutions, because even seemingly simple problems—getting the supplies from one country to another—could prove surprisingly daunting. “They had a lot of challenges in getting their shipping containers to the different countries because of customs,” explains the Carlson School team’s project chair, Adrienne Peirce. “We suggested that they develop global distribution centers and ways that they cold leverage other U.S. distribution centers or share space.”

While most of the other teams focused on quickly ramping up distribution, the Carlson School’s team offered options that required more time upfront to implement, but reaped greater rewards over the long-term. They also took the risky approach of downplaying sustainability efforts. “We studied the issue, but found that the case for [improving] sustainability was not a good [strategy] for this company,” says Frohn. “The fact that they are giving life-saving equipment and supplies to developing countries was much more compelling.”

Because the Carlson School’s team focused primarily on the organization’s growth over its sustainability efforts, they did not receive enough points to advance to the final round. Nonetheless, their solution sparked real interest from MedShare. “At the closing of the banquet, we were told that our strategy was the most innovative of the competition,” says Frohn. “The board of directors planned to discuss the possibility of implementing it.”

The students agree that the value of the competition was less about the results of the contest than the chance to put classroom theories to the test. In the end, they got to offer guidance to an organization with a real business problem; it was a solution that wouldn’t just get a grade, it had the chance to be implemented.

Peirce says she was inspired by the range of perspectives people brought to their solutions, and she hopes to maintain many of the connections she made at the conference. “Non-profits have a lot of interesting strategic issues,” she says. “It’s important to understand the ways that private companies and the public sphere can intersect.”