What qualities do Sam Goldman and his team have that will help them solve the problem of providing light to the billions of people in the world who lack access to reliable electricity?

Imagine the following. You are in the audience of a business plan competition. The next team up to present is d.light, a for-profit social enterprise that plans to bring light to people without access to reliable electricity. Two young men introduce themselves as the founders of d.light, and say they’re going to start their presentation with a demonstration. The lights go out. In a few seconds, you see a dim light at the front of the room, and smell smoke and burning kerosene. After about 30 seconds, your eyes start to water and it becomes slightly uncomfortable to breathe. The lights switch back on and the smoke clears. The young men apologize for the lack of light and the smoke, but say the demonstration was staged to illustrate a point. Around 1.2 billion people, or more than one fifth of the world’s population, have no access to electricity, and about a billion more have an unreliable or intermittent supply. An estimated 500 million households must burn some sort of fuel, such as kerosene, for cooking or lighting. Kerosene fuel is expensive, dangerous, and toxic to both people and the environment. In fact, the United Nations estimates that kerosene fumes kill 1.5 million people per year, and cause countless health complications for others.