Does generating business profits while increasing long-term social values in your community seem to be a daunting task? A new trend, social enterprises, may hold the answer to this predicament.

“Social enterprises have become a big trend all over the world, especially in Japan, and we see the same trend happening here in Vietnam,” said Yoshitaka Ohara of Habataku, Inc., a Japanese social enterprise.

Habataku’s vision says the firm wants to create a society where all people are able to possess their own dream, acquire the ability to pave the way to that dream, and take on challenges in order to make it come true.

Making life better, sustainably

Many people have realized that normal charity activities and donations are not sustainable anymore. In addition, some feel that they have the responsibility to solve social issues, which cannot be settled purely with charity.

“In the last few decades, many have been trying to resolve social issues with volunteering, donations, and governmental funding, but those activities won’t last long as soon as the funding stops. As a result, building a business model to sustain those activities seems to be a better choice, and many have begun with their own social enterprises,” Ohara told Tuoitrenews in a recent interview.

In Japan the trend became more popular after being triggered by the earthquake and tsunami disaster three years ago, Ohara said, adding that everyone he knows is discovering that life is not as sustainable and stable as they once expected, and everything around them, even their beloved friends and belongings, can vanish and collapse within seconds.

For that reason, chasing money to fulfill their materialistic demands will not really bring them happiness at the end of the day, he said.

Thus, people are trying to do something good for their society while earning money at the same time: it is a way to pursue the dream sustainably, the Japanese man observed.

“One of my friends who graduated from Harvard has chosen this path for his life,” he said.

As a result, Habataku organized a field trip, Co-Creation Journey, in late February for a group of Japanese and Vietnamese students to help them expand their knowledge and to discover how people in the developing world outside Japan live, Ohara explained.

Via the trip, the Japanese students learned a lot from reality. They saw how locals in developing countries lead their lives and the social pains they suffer every day, which helped generate ideas for their own social enterprises so they can one day help improve the lives of those people, he said.

It offered them a chance to exchange with the local students who may become their partners in future businesses, Ohara asserted.

Asked if he was envisioning a network of social enterprises set up from those taking part in his firm’s activities in Southeast Asia, Ohara said a plan for it was in the works, as his firms were planning to organize trips to many countries like Vietnam, Lao, Cambodia, Myanmar, and Thailand.  

Ohara, who used to work as a strategic business consultant at IBM Japan, is responsible for all of the firm’s activities in Vietnam and is also the co-founder of Habataku, Inc.

He holds a Masters in Engineering in Non-linear Dynamics from the graduate school of Osaka Prefecture University.

Habataku means “flapping wings (into the sky),” and is also a Japanese homonym of “to have a Takt (a conductor’s baton),” he said.

First contacts - first lessons

With an aim to raise awareness of social responsibility, the seven-day Co-Creation Journey was seen as an opportunity for students from Vietnamese and Japanese universities to join many cultural exchange activities and approach sustainable business models.

Besides offering participants a chance to have a better understanding of hearing-impaired Vietnamese, the event also required students to make their own business plans that would help disabled people overcome the difficulties of daily life.

The participating group, made up of 12 Japanese and Vietnamese students divided into three small teams, worked on ideas on papers and paid visits to the homes of some locals with hearing impairments in Ho Chi Minh City.

Mika Tanimori, a student from Kyoto University, was stunned that Nguyen Thi Tuong Vy, 45, could ride her motorbike on the crowded streets of HCMC to her workplace where she has worked as a tailor for more than 10 years.

At Vy’s shop, Mika spent hours talking with Vy, both through body language and writing, and saw how Vy could make beautiful dresses just as an able-bodied person can.

“I was surprised to see she could do everything like a normal person, like riding a motorbike, making dresses, and talking with me,” Tanimori said.

“In Japan, there are also disabled people who can’t find jobs and can’t live on their own, I think it’s a problem, so I want to know how disabled people find jobs here,” she added. “I think that even if deaf people can’t hear, they can communicate with each other, and if they have skills, they can get a job.”

Ryosuke Oka, a student from Hokkaido University, joined a team of four to visit Le Thien Nhan, 12, a student at a local primary school in the southern city. The boy should be studying at a middle school by his age, but is behind because he is hearing-impaired.

"I visited a boy with a hearing impairment, but he goes to normal school. When I went to school with him I saw how difficult it was for him to understand what his teacher was saying. I noticed that he kept watching his teacher’s mouth very carefully to try to read her lips. So our team came up with the idea of making headphones that can translate the teacher’s voice into words for him to read on a screen," said Ryosuke Oka.

"This program lasted only seven days. Everything was just ideas and we need to develop more in the future, but it’s good to encourage young people to create new ideas. Who knows, in the future our ideas could be made into real products and will help deaf people," said Tam, a student at Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City University of Technology.

"Although the students have not researched the market carefully, they came up with ideas for great products to help hearing-impaired people. I’m impressed by the idea of creating the headphones: it’s really a necessary product," Duong Phuong Hanh, director of the HCMC-based Center for Research and Education of Deaf and Hard of Hearing (CED), said.

"CED will try our best to work with them to use the ideas and make them into real products to help the hearing-impaired community."

"Their ideas are nice in general, but there are some points they have to think of to be more realistic. But they spent only seven days together, and they had just met each other, so they did well, but they need to keep thinking to make it happen," Yoshitaka Ohara commented.

"They became enthusiastic about helping people because they spent all seven days thinking how they could make people happier."