Ashoka Cover Letter

Part 1: New Idea

The latest idea that I have created and bring into fruition is to make coconut water which very nutritious
but has a short shelf life, to become shelf stable with only limited budget. Why talking about coconut
water? Because Indonesia right now is global top 3 coconut producer in the world. Right before
becoming top 3 producer, Indonesia was the number 1 coconut producer in the world. With that amount
of production, coconut fruit often left to be decayed on the ground. This problem can be solved by taking
the fruit and get the coconut water from it.

Before this, there’s already technology to prolong the shelf life of coconut water, but all of them is very
expensive and require big piece of land to operate, therefore will need big capital to start the factory
development. The solution that I and team develop enable to cut the capital cost around 80%-90% just
to build the small-scale factory, while also dropping the minimum amount of production trial needed
from 100L minimum to 20L minimum, which decreasing around 80%. The production result can be
maintained up to 12 months in chilled condition with the same taste as when it was just produced.

The impact of the new technology is opening the door to many other aspiring entrepreneurs to start
their business in coconut water, enabling more people to enter and developing the market of coconut
water.

Part 2: Youth Entrepreneurship

As early as my year in elementary school grade 4, I was living in poverty. I couldn’t get any allowance and
feel hungry during the class. Lucky for me my grade was quite good back then. So, I came to school early
and start selling my homework answers to my peers in exchange for snacks and some change. By doing
this, not only I can feel full during classes, able to gaining my weight, earning respect from friends, and
pocketing some extra cash for allowance.

This experience has taught me several things. The first is sometimes innovation and solution doesn’t
need to be fancy or high tech. Sometimes the simplest answer was to most beautiful solution for given
problems. Furthermore, I learnt to marketing and branding myself to my peers in order to sell my
product (homework answers). The last one is I learnt not to easily give up in front of rejection and
humiliation from others. While selling my answers, often people looking down on me for being poor, or
reject my answers because they think it’s not fool-proof. I just keep proving that my homework answers
can get quite a good mark every single time and let the product speak for itself while trying to get better
ranking for credibility purpose.