Eric Tyler is Research Fellow with New America Foundation , a non-profit U.S. think tank , based in Washington DC . He is currently at sea . Hilo , Hawaii What happens when you mix 11 budding startups with Google executives , Stanford professors , a Nobel Peace Laureate and 600 college students and put them on a ship to circumnavigate the world ? An experiment launched this month called Unreasonable at Sea hopes that this eclectic group will unleash global entrepreneurship . A 590-foot ocean liner has become the incubator for this experiment , attracting aboard both multinational companies and international foundations , venture capitalists and environmental philanthropists , even a Saudi Arabian prince and the founder of WordPress . All want to take part in fostering the entrepreneurial efforts of those on the ship . From Hawaii , the program will visit a range of developed markets from Japan to Spain as well as developing markets from Burma ( also known as Myanmar ) to Ghana . This allows for a crucial opportunity to not just tweak business models but more importantly test products in local contexts . For many of the founders , who come from countries around the world , this is their first voyage on a ship . As such , seasickness on the choppy waters of the Pacific has been a recurring struggle , but it has not deterred the entrepreneurs from diving head first into the business workshops , one-on-one meetings and pitch events . The program is spearheaded by Stanford University 's Institute of Design and the Unreasonable Institute , which has teamed up with Semester at Sea to embark on a 105-day journey to 13 countries around the world . It also has financial support from backers including Microsoft and SAP . At its core , the program believes in creating a melting pot of individuals with different backgrounds , experiences and perspectives while also maintaining a context of openness that does n't shy away from experimentation and failure . And it 's no surprise to hear lunch conversations focused on intellectual property challenges in China and supply chain strategies for Sub-Saharan Africa . When I boarded the ship , the co-founder of the program , Daniel Epstein , explained to me the unique criteria he sought for the chosen entrepreneurs . `` We are not looking for typical Silicon Valley startups , '' he said . `` We are hedging our bets on the black swans : startups who are leveraging technology to solve seemingly intractable social and environment challenges and who are positioned within billion dollar market opportunities . We hand selected these ventures from nearly 1,000 applications coming from just shy of 100 countries . '' The handful of participating startups could be from a technocrat 's dream with products ranging from a tablet teacher training software to a solar-powered cooking stove . They are also geographically diverse with founders joining from China , Botswana , Spain , India , and Mexico , among other destinations . George Kembel , the co-founder of Stanford 's d.school , also leads the seaboard program . He told me : `` We find ourselves at a time in which we 're shifting from a most industrialized era to a new era . And almost all of the institutions that were built on that last model that got us this far are n't really adapted for carrying us much farther . '' After an orientation session on the deck , I spoke with Deepak Ravindran , founder and CEO of Innoz , one of the more developed companies participating in the program . His idea began when he noticed that his friends in his Indian home state of Kerala did n't have access to internet , but they all had mobile phones . So in 2009 , Ravindran and three classmates dropped out of college to focus on bridging this information gap through the development of a text message-based search engine . Currently , the company has 120 million users and receives five million text message queries a day . And he says this is only the beginning . `` There are a lot of dumb phones in the world , and what I want is to make every dumb phone smart with information . Maybe because of this chance to visit 14 countries , we can see whether we can launch at scale . '' In the end , Unreasonable at Sea is moving into uncharted waters , and to a large degree , nobody on the ship knows exactly what the end result of this bold experiment will be . But despite this ambiguity , there is sense that this social alchemy might very well lead to innovation .
Leaders , academics and students set sail on a global business trip . A voyage to 13 countries to test enterprise ideas . Program is called Unreasonable at Sea and starts from Hawaii .