Special Report - International Education - M.B.A."s Guide Socially Concerned Entrepreneurs - NYTimes.com PARIS - As questions go, it was short and to the point: "If you are so smart, why aren't you rich?" That challenge, splashed across her daughter's T-shirt, inspired Una Ryan to leave a medical research career, developing vaccines, to start her own business. "Being a medical researcher, I changed that statement to say, if you are so smart, why haven't you saved more lives?," said Ms. Ryan, at a lunch in Paris last month honoring finalists in this year's Cartier Women's Initiative Awards, an annual competition for women entrepreneurs. Ms. Ryan was one of five winners of this year's awards. Getting vaccines approved through the U.S. regulatory process takes years. I thought to myself, if we could just clean the water, we could eliminate many diseases all at once," she said. Following up that logic, Ms. Ryan founded Waltham Technologies, a water purification company in Boston of which she is the chief executive. Waltham uses bioengineered blue-green algae and sunlight to clean wastewater and generate biofuels. In competing for the awards, Ms. Ryan and other finalists were coached in business plan drafting and oral presentation skills by 30 M.B.A. students and alumni from Insead, the international business school in Fontainebleau, near Paris. Insead has sponsored the awards for the past three years, tuning in to a growing interest in social entrepreneurship among its students as business graduates everywhere react to the worst recession since the Great Depression and the prospects of a jobless recovery. A survey this year of M.B.A. applicants by QS TopMBA.com, a career guidance Web site, found that 28.4 percent of respondents cited "starting own business" as a prime aspiration, up from 24 percent in 2006, while "improving career prospects" had dropped to 66.2 percent from 73 percent. Insead has adapted its curriculum accordingly. "The coaching program has been fully integrated into Insead's M.B.A. curriculum as "entrepreneurial field study,"" said Loïc Sadoulet, an affiliate professor of economics at Insead who served on the Cartier Awards jury panel, in an interview in Paris. "With the current financial crisis, we have seen student interest shift from investment banking and consulting jobs - the dot.com get-rich model - to social entrepreneurship, a socially conscious model," Mr. Sadoulet said. "Google's motto, "Don't be evil," resonates more and more with our students. Most now want job options that "make sense."" In addition to prize money, the award winners, drawn from five continents, will receive yearlong business coaching to help get their ventures started. "Insead students and alumni work with these real-life entrepreneurs from the embryonic "idea" stage to the creation of a business plan," Mr. Sadoulet said. Many will continue after graduation to provide ongoing coaching support. Christine Borgoltz, director of external relations for Cartier, said, "There are many women's or entrepreneurship prizes. Our added value is the continued coaching support, which is what these businesses need most. The luxury brand created the awards program in 2006 together with Insead, the management consultancy company McKinsey & Co., and the Women's Forum for the Economy and Society, an international association for the professional development of women. For Insead's student coaches, their role in helping to build a profitable, yet socially conscious, business is a valuable learning experience. "M.B.A. students with prior corporate experience see the world as a place where you spend money and make problems go away," said Lisa Long, a 2006 Insead graduate who is chief operating officer of Six To Start, a media company in Britain that she helped to found in 2007. Coaching a start-up, you discover what a thinly resourced business looks like, learn what things to prioritize and what things to starve. Ms. Long coached winning teams in the Cartier Awards in 2007 and again this year.