Discuss a time when you have been innovative in your personal or professional life.

Sample One (Excerpt)

I spent my junior year abroad in Botswana and was able to see a society that, while modernized by the mining industry and quite rich by African standards, still has a divided workforce between men and women. I was introduced to a women’s cooperative by a school mate and became fascinated by the efforts of these women to transform domestic art into enterprise. During my year abroad I became involved in the cooperative, helping to find a market for the textile goods in the United States through my network of family and friends. As I was able to contribute to demand, I observed that the cooperative had a hard time meeting that demand. The women could only produce a certain number of goods per week – not due to a lack of time, but due to a lack of funds.

Back at Emory during my senior year I learned more about the field of microeconomics and decided to start my own fund to specifically help the women I met in Botswana. I worked with a few friends from my business fraternity and we pooled our extra money to come up with an initial loan of $2,500. We incorporated our business and wrote up legal loan documents with our clients. I identified one of the women in the cooperative as our advisor on the ground, and she provided guidance to suggest which women and products were most in need.

At the end of that first year we helped ten women increase their output, which had a direct impact on sales. Collectively sales increased by 56%. Most exciting was the tangible impact the money had on these women’s lives. One woman in particular was able to send her daughter for math tutoring, which helped her gain admission to an extremely good secondary school and increasing her future economic potential.

Sample Two (Excerpt)

In the summer of 2006, we faced cuts in funding from our angel investor at my firm. This required us to both lay off two full time employees and reconsider our product strategy. We additionally had to find a way to achieve our operating goals with severely limited resources. In this constrained circumstance I learned that often difficulty can lead to innovative thinking.

Working with the CEO and our lead scientists, I determined that we needed to change course in our strategy from developing individual drugs to delivering a process for assisting large pharmaceutical companies with their own research. While developing individual drugs is a high investment enterprise requiring years of FDA approval and trials before we would realize any revenue, developing a system that would equip other pharma companies to develop their drugs could utilize our core expertise and see immediate results.

My innovative idea inspired confidence in senior executives, and our president agreed that our top priority should be a proof of concept for my new strategy and a business plan to attract investors.

I collaborated with scientists and senior management to co-develop a new business plan. It was an interesting process to collaborate with experts in both business and biotech. I realized that the industry faces unique challenges, and while it is important in business to maintain a focus on the bottom line, it is crucial in healthcare to keep the needs of the consumer and patient top of mind. Focusing on efficiencies in human resources and processes is most important, while maintaining high quality research and development to ensure a viable and beneficial product. Ultimately my plan was presented to investors at biotechnology conferences and we began implementation with the new funding the plan attracted.

Sample Three

All of the founding members of Vetsight had worked together before, and we were excited to launch another startup. We were a team in search of a reason for being. The innovative idea for our company came to me one day when I took my dog to the vet and witnessed the difficulty in diagnosing a patient who could not speak: we decided to design a diagnostic tool that could quickly diagnose common veterinary conditions.

Although the idea was straightforward, industry research demonstrated that the economics of the veterinary business wouldn’t support a high tech diagnostic tool. We also lacked industry knowledge on our start up team of software engineers.

In a unanimous vote, we abandoned our quest to launch Vetsight Technologies as a veterinary diagnostic tools provider. However, I was still convinced my idea had potential and I proposed that we redefine the company as a software development company, capitalizing on our core programming expertise.

When we brought in an angel investor with experience in the health care industry he was excited by our software idea and mentioned there was a significant push in human health care towards simple diagnostic tools for use by non-doctors or health care professionals in the field without hospital tools.

Today we continue to work on our software under a new name, Diagtouch. Through this experience I learned it’s important to listen to both data and the team input when making a decision. Sometimes the decision not to pursue an idea is the most important one, but the seed of an abandoned project may lead to new innovative ideas.

Sample Four

I believe in the transformative power of sustainable design and constantly seek opportunities to soften the environmental impact of the modern commercial landscape. Last year, I decided to broaden my influence and attempted to initiate a firmwide environmental awareness program that would eventually reach our clients around the world.

After my initial lobbying, my board granted me four weeks to develop a detailed program presentation. The complexity of the project meant that I would need to leverage the expertise of the mid-level architects in my office, so I delegated several

tasks, created a master project calendar, and communicated that I was willing to help out with any aspect of the project. When I later gathered the team for a status update, I was stunned by the lack of progress. To my surprise, my co-workers did not appear to have a clear understanding of my expectations; their contributions were not what I was hoping for.

I decided to solicit feedback from my colleagues in order to better understand their lack of engagement in my project, I learned that they did not place a high priority on this project because it was not core to our job responsibilities. I realized I need to motivate everyone towards my innovative idea and build excitement for its own sake, because it would not have a large impact on anyone’s career.

To clarify individual responsibilities and goals and to fuse our diverse talents toward a common aim, I realized that I needed to clearly communicate my goals and excite others to share my passion for the initiative. To do so, I arranged individual meetings with each of the team members and explained in detail the valuable contribution our efforts could make to the environment if the program was approved by the board. Members of the team responded by taking much more pride in their individual assignments while also collaborating more effectively. Six months after our rocky team launch, we received a $30,000 grant to support further environmental research and staff education.

Sample Five

I started working with Lark Community Center after introduced to the “reading to kids” program by a friend. After a year of Saturday morning reading sessions, I wanted to expand my involvement. Slowly I started tutoring high school kids and sometimes even coaching the occasional pick up basketball game at the center.

When I heard from the executive director, Janis, that the community center had a funding issue, and was suffering from a lack of volunteers, I wanted to help. I knew that my fairly large network of personal and professional contacts could be a huge asset to the community center. After talking to several friends and brainstorming ideas to help the center, I met with the executive director to make a proposal.

In my meeting with Janis I suggested starting an informal club for people interested in volunteering and fundraising for the community center as part of a group of like-minded young professionals. We would be “Friends of the Lark Community Center.”

Janis was skeptical that a group of twenty-something young professionals would have the time and inclination to commit to the community center, but she was willing to let me try. She suggested a six-month trial period and obtained board buy-in to fully support the endeavor for that period.

After six months the Friends of Lark Community Center consisted of eight volunteer tutors who were working with high potential high school kids once a week after school. An additional team of six fundraising volunteers was hard at work on our annual gala, and had already raised $12,000 in corporate sponsorships.

The success of the group was unexpected even for me, but I realized that the combination of social interaction with like-minded young professionals and the great feeling of doing good for our city led to strong cohesion in the group.

Janis was impressed, and extended the support of the center for the Friends indefinitely. Today the Friends of Lark Community center has expanded more than three fold. Now we tutor kids of all ages and continue to host a highly successful Casino Night event annually to support the center.