RUBICON PROGRAMS, INC.

Rubicon Programs, Inc., is a California Bay-area nonprofit started in 1973 in response to California's large-scale closing of psychiatric hospitals and the resulting flow of patients into communities. Here is Rubicon's mission statement:

Rubicon Programs' mission is to create and deliver integrated solutions to profound social problems.

Our purpose is to make a positive and lasting impact on people living in poverty and on people living with disabilities, especially psychiatric disabilities. We empower people to move out of poverty and improve their quality of life.

Rubicon specialized in providing vulnerable populations with job training and life skills, so that they would be able to enter society successfully, not as welfare recipients, but as wage-earners. Many of their clients work in one of the organization's two enterprises, Rubicon Bakery and Rubicon Landscaping Services, which is intended to serve not just as a training ground for clients but also as a source of earned revenues.

Imagine that Rubicon is contemplating an expansion to a new earned-income venture: data-entry for local governments, in response to a statewide mandate to contract out these services. You are in charge of the team to develop this idea and determine whether it is a viable market opportunity.

1. What background would you need on your team to properly develop this idea?

2. Is this new venture idea an adaptive social enterprise or an innovation? Both? Explain.

3. Where in Maslow's hierarchy would you place this idea? What needs must have been met previously with the clients to make the new venture a potentially successful idea?

4. What is the source of this opportunity?