The countdown has already started. Now we are hoping Bill Clinton, the former president of the United States, will announce on Thursday that our team from New York University-Abu Dhabi has the US$1 million (Dh3.67m) winning idea, writes Neil Parmar.
Our odds have certainly improved since 4,000 teams first applied to the latest Hult Global Case Challenge, which pitches itself as the biggest crowd-sourcing initiative in the world dedicated to solving social challenges.
Yet, despite having won a regional contest in Dubai, we still have to beat four more teams in New York that advanced from Shanghai, London, Boston and San Francisco, as well as a fifth and final group of competitors who won a virtual contest via Facebook.
Even if we do win the $1m prize, we will not see the cash.
Instead, the funds go to a charitable organisation called SolarAid, which will spend the money implementing the team's business model that seems the most able to provide light for 1 million households in Africa by simultaneously selling solar lamps and eliminating hazardous kerosene.
Here is the twist: our ideas must be able to light these homes by the end of next year.
Other teams within Hult's challenge are battling it out to assist the Habitat for Humanity and One Laptop per Child charities. Yet regardless of the organisation a group has chosen to help, everyone's presentations must be slick enough to impress business leaders such as Michael Treschow, the chairman of Unilever, and Muhammad Yunus, the Nobel Peace Prize winner who pioneered micro-financing.
Yet our team, yes I'm in it because I graduated from New York University (NYU), consists of just five individuals with zero MBA experience.
It includes four undergraduate students from NYU's Abu Dhabi campus: Madhav Vaidyanathan, 21; Songyishu Yang, 20; Muhammad Awais Islam, 21; and Ruey-Ting (Gary) Chien, 19. Even combined, all of us still lack the real-life business experience of either Mr Treschow or Mr Yunus, not to mention the other A-listers slated to scrutinise our pitches.
Which is where Hult's concept of crowd-sourcing - or outsourcing idea generation from members of the public - comes in handy.
For us, technology has played a crucial role in helping our efforts to gather research from the public domain and fact-check various assumptions of our model through outside contacts.
Some of our team's members have found helpful background material through links shared on Twitter, by browsing keywords marked with a hashtag, such as #SolarAid or the name of potential partners we have been collaborating closely with.
Videos posted on YouTube have featured interviews with some of the entrepreneurs in Africa whose talents we had once considered harnessing, although we subsequently had to adapt that idea to target another group of professionals there.
Family members and friends have provided key insights about the geographic and demographic make-up of the countries and customers we seek to target through Facebook and good old-fashioned email.
One friend in Toronto once spent months volunteering and travelling through western Kenya, Malawi, Uganda, Zambia and the Bagamoyo district of Tanzania.
In addition to sharing her observations on settlement patterns there, she also passed on messages from her own network of contacts who live in Kenya as well as Tanzania.
Facebook has also proven to be handy group-editing tool, where until 1am on recent evenings the five of us have sat glued to the screens of four separate laptops while tweaking our presentation script.
That process alone consisted of 53 separate messages, until we found a more technologically efficient, albeit old-school solution: projecting the script on to the wall of a study room and shouting out changes.
While I am being intentionally vague about what, exactly, our model proposes, because paranoia of tipping off our competitors to our strategy has completely set in after four months of working on this project, technology has proved to be crucial to our team's operations.
There is only one aspect that we would argue is more important in shaping our model: real-life, on-the-ground research.
Members of our team were fortunate enough to conduct a two-phase trip to East Africa, where our model first got turned on its head then refined.
[ nparmar@thenational.ae ]
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