Homegrown all-Pinoy team wins top prize in world's leading entrepreneurship tilt

A group of Filipino students and professionals won the grand prize on May 18 in the MIT $100K, an entrepreneurship contest run by the world-renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is arguably the most prestigious entrepreneurship contest in the U.S. The MIT $100K, in its 17 years, has facilitated the birth of over 60 companies with an aggregate value of $10.5 billion, generated 1,800 jobs and $175 million in venture capital funding.

The business is CentroMigrante, a for-profit company that provides not only clean and affordable temporary housing but also temporary employment through its water station business to migrants who flock to urban areas seeking employment but are usually unable to afford decent lodging while searching and waiting for jobs. In the Philippines, as many as one million Filipinos a year spend up to seven months away from their home provinces and in Manila's port areas looking for jobs as seafarers, most of them living in shanties under depressed and undignified living conditions.

Like a perfect halo-halo, CentroMigrante struck the right mix of innovation, profitability and social advocacy addressing serious housing and employment problems and the lack of a robust revenue model that will make providing temporary housing to these transients self-sustaining and most importantly, profitable, through a combination of developmental architecture with a self-help business model to offer a sustainable solution. Clean housing for the migrants, temporary employment to pay for the rent and a profitable business to maintain and grow the housing facilities-the result: a profitable eco-system.

The team is led by Illac Diaz, a research fellow in the Special Program for Urban and Regional Studies at MIT, with team members Neil Ruiz, a Ph.D. candidate in political economy at MIT; Tina Laforteza, a corporate internal strategy consultant for a Fortune 100 company with an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management; Artessa Saldivar-Sali, a professor of civil engineering at University of the Philippines with a master's degree in civil and environmental engineering from MIT; Chester Yu, an MBA candidate at the MIT Sloan School; and Bianca Locsin, a Yale Law School graduate who runs the programs for the Konrad Adenauer Stiftung Foundation in the Philippines.

From 164 entries, narrowed down to 37, then to 12 finalists, CentroMigrante bested other teams among them AeroVax and OneWorld Medical Devices, both of which developed their own low-cost vaccination device and Kalpataru which uses technology to deliver micro-finance services in India.

Incidentally, Diaz, Ruiz and Laforteza are some of the founding members of MIT Philippine Emerging Startups Open (PESO), which brought over the same MIT entrepreneurship contest to the Philippines last year.

Those interested in finding out more about CentroMigrante could email: [email protected]. Also for more information about the MIT $100K Competition go to the following website: http://www.mit50k.net. For more information about PESO go to: http://web.mit.edu/peso