Cause's Failure Essay

765 Words2 Pages

Cause was a social innovation in the form of a restaurant. The idea was that the creators would run a restaurant, called a “philanthropub”, in Washington, D.C. (Sidman). However, instead of being a traditional non-profit organization, Cause was ran as a for-profit company that acted like a non-profit by donating extra profits to charity. However, 14 months after opening, the philanthropub closed its doors (Bhattarai). Two major problems factored into Cause’s failure, the inflated expectations and subsequent backlash by the public against the company and the owners’ lack of experience and commitment to the venture. Nick Vilelle and Raj Ratwani were the cofounders of Cause. However, they did not have experience in the restaurant business and …show more content…

Vielle and Ratwani’s lack of experience was a detriment to their restaurant, but they could have worked full-time on their organization to gain experience. Instead, they did not fully commit on their organization and thus limited their ability to lead their company. Thus, it is important to commit to the organization to gain experience that one may lack to compensate for this. This is also applicable to our group’s social innovation of developing a catnip starter kit in Kenya as none of us have any experience in botany or working in developing nations. It would then be extremely important that we commit fully to our social innovation to develop the experience needed to effectively lead our organization despite the lack of experience. Cause’s breaking of its promises and predictions caused significant backlash from its community and had actually effects on the company’s viability. Other organizations need to be wary of what it promises to its community so that it is a reachable goal while also drawing interest from the public. In our catnip project, this is especially important as the strength of our catnip oil is unknown. We should then make sure to state to our supporters that initial testing of our product will need to be done. Through emphasising that further research is needed, we will be able to avoid the backlash that Cause faced should our catnip starter kit be ineffective or have

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