SOCIAL INNOVATION

The Mewlin’ project – Social Innovation

Coach:

Tran Xuan Linh

Nguyen Thi Thuy Trang

Project leader: Pham Ngoc Thuy Diem

Vice leader: Nguyen Dang Quynh Tram

Member:

Vo Trong Khoi

Nguyen Ngoc Nhu

Nguyen Dang Quynh Thu

Dong Kien Tai

Nguyen Khanh Linh

Nguyen Ngoc Kieu Trinh

Nguyen Vu Hong Ngan

Lai Truc Lam

Bui Minh Khang

Vu Thi Anh Thu

About Mewlin’:
Mewlin’ is a social enterprise that aims to improve young people’s English communication skills, thereby helping them develop themselves and increase their opportunities to study and work.

Core Values: M-E-W

Mindfulness: We want to become a place for you to both perfect your English communication skills and relax after a long tiring day.
Edu-healing: We are willing to serve your interests, including your professional skills (English) and your mental life.
Willingness: We understand and respect your present moment, whether in that moment you are trying to study, practice or are resting and relaxing.

10 minutes clip of Mewlin”s presentation:

Mewlin’ – Round 1 – Social Innovation Generation – Engsub

Mewlin’ presentation:

Mewlin’ – Presentation – Social Innovation

A. Social business idea

A1. Social mantra one-liner

Healing English communication solution to improve young adult confidence in communication for self-development and self-healing

Business solution: Healing English communication solution
Target customers: Young adult
Social solution: Self-development and self-healing

This business mantra has garnered positive feedback from both qualitative and quantitative surveys

A2. Contributions to UN goals

Our goal is to provide young adults around Vietnam with practical English communication lessons through healing and relaxing activities. Mewlin”s purpose is to raise a generation of Vietnamese youngsters who can effectively communicate in English, manage stress, and improve mental health with a single app.

Mewlin’ collaborates with English communication educators, mental health specialists, and other important stakeholders to pursue the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs):

Goal 3: To contribute to enhancing mental health among young adults through relaxing and healing learning activities.
Goal 4: To improve access to English communication learning, empower young individuals to develop confidence in communication skills, and thus advance a society with equal learning opportunities for all.

Vision: Offering practical English communication education to young adults nationwide through relaxing and healing activities.

Mission: Reducing the prevalence of Vietnamese youth lacking proficiency in English communication knowledge and skills by employing an innovative and unique educational approach.

B. ESG preparedness

B1. Target issues

For secondary research, we conducted interviews and surveys to collect more specific statistics, extract information from many reputable sources such as WHO, Ministry of Information and Communications, journals, et cetera. Besides, we also do Primary research, with 402 quantitative data from April 6th to April 13th, and 16 qualitative interviews, including 13 target customers and 3 experts. Primary research indicates that respondents find Mewlin’s business idea highly unique, with an impressive average score of four point one.

Four hundred ninety five is the average EFI score of Vietnamese adults aged eighteen to twenty five, classified as LOW proficiency. Vietnam ranks 23/40 compared to other countries organizing IELTS. With TOEFL, Vietnam ranked 24/30 compared to other countries in Southeast Asia. The above numbers show that being fluent in English significantly affects success in work and study. Learners cannot find appropriate support, waste too much time and feel negative and frustrated. This leads to increasingly limited international language integration of Vietnamese young people and causes them to fall further behind in the globalization process.

B2. Root causes

The Iceberg Model helps to infer the problems that Vietnamese learners are facing during the learning process. On the outside, Vietnamese young people want to study and develop their knowledge of English, but they always procrastinate and are not disciplined enough throughout the learning process. For deep causes, at Pattern level, Young people often feel tired and pressured during the learning process. For structure level, users have thoughts like learning often requires a lot of time and effort. This makes them not patient enough to follow the entire learning process, or try to learn too much in a short period of time to quickly complete the process, so they are easily exhausted. For the mental model level, most young people think that they are not fluent in English, their pronunciation is not good, their vocabulary is not rich enough, so they gradually LACK CONFIDENCE when communicating, and they are not brave enough to practice lessons in life and step out of their comfort zone. This is the core and important reason why they cannot improve their speaking skills, because they do not know what they lack, what they need to improve, and lack the opportunity to practice directly.

B3. Current solution landscape

Compared to today’s popular platforms, they may have a team of experienced teachers, or many teaching languages available, or outstanding strengths like Elsa, focusing on pronunciation. But in terms of their level of healing and relaxation, it is not as high as Mewlin’, and it can be said that Mewlin’ is the platform with the highest level of healing currently. Besides, we also conducted a survey with 43 people, obtained a score of about 9.5 in terms of uniqueness and 9.05 in terms of interestingness.

In order to research more deeply the current solution landscape, we applied the Impact Gaps Canvas Model. With challenge mapping, there is a lack of confidence when using English in front of a crowd, easy boredom when there is no change in the teaching program about theoretical knowledge. In addition, there is a lack of motivation in learning and insufficient opportunities to practice in real-life situations. To solve those problems, we decided to build Mewlin’ as an English app that completely focuses on communication in the most natural and motivated way, as well as create a connection between the learner and the application.

B4. Solution to implement

Regarding solutions to implement, Mewlin’ achieves goal through three main activities and divides them into two sections, beginning with Business activities: edu-healing mobile app and workshop. These activities implemented in this section include studying vocabulary through podcasts, writing diary, interacting with AI celebrities, and especially healing workshops in English. The second group is Social activities, which will support English teaching funds as well as provide free accounts for students with difficult circumstances. Our ideas above have received a lot of support and they are feasible and highly applicable because we did a quantitative survey.

B5. Solution uniqueness

The differences in Mewlin’ solutions have been proven through the two quantitative surveys. In which the uniqueness achieved an impressive average score of 4.1, the newness and the interesting both scored 4.0. These differences help Mewlin’ apart in a current crowded market of English learning solutions.

C. Stakeholder engagement

C1. Engagement strategy

Mewlin’ applies the Power Interest Matrix to examine and categorize stakeholders into four groups: Keep Satisfy, Monitor, Manage Closely, and Keep Informed, based on their interests and power levels. The most influential groups identified are: English Lecturer, Psychologist Specialist, Website & App Specialist, and Investor. Now let’s analyze these 4 groups!

The first group provides professional knowledge and experience in English learning for Mewlin’. The project needs to pay attention to them because their expertise is vital for a communication English learning application like Mewlin’.
Psychologists are next. These mental health experts can provide opinions on how relaxed and healing activities affect learning and memory.
The next group focuses on participating in building the applications, so it can be inferred that ensuring app and website operation and development are the important values this group may contribute to Mewlin’.
The last group is investors, who are responsible for providing useful financial advice for the project. Therefore, Mewlin’ can attract investors because of its potential profit. However, not all of them care about profits. Therefore, focusing on the social value contribution of the project is considered another way for Mewlin’ to attract interest from investors.

C2. Social support campaign performance

Mewlin’ started a social support campaign to engage stakeholders, utilizing online crowdfunding on Facebook with tiered sponsorship benefits for investors. Furthermore, direct approaches via emails, meetings, and social platform messages were employed, and endorsements were secured through digital and physical signatures tailored to stakeholder preferences.

These efforts yielded significant results, garnering 75 signatures and support from renowned organizations, specialists, and tutors. Notable backers include the University of Greenwich, HTV television station, CMC Global, Yeu Lu Media, Green Center, Phuc Khang, and IMS. Moreover, within 2 weeks of Round 1, Mewlin’ raised over 53 million VND through crowdfunding and crowdsourcing efforts.

D. Learning curve

We’ve uncovered crucial insights. Firstly, young adults aspire to enhance their English communication but often delay learning due to confidence issues. Mewlin’ addresses this with relaxing and mental healing content. Secondly, English experts emphasize the need for improved communication skill development, reaffirming Mewlin’s commitment to innovative learning approaches. Lastly, we acknowledge the necessity for input from mental health specialists to bolster our understanding of relaxation’s role in enhancing English learning.

Mewlin’

Lab Leader: