Here are some helpful ideas on what will set you apart in the selection process:

Are you an Unreasonable Entrepreneur?

• Can you demonstrate a relentlessly entrepreneurial spirit and or past entrepreneurial experience?
• Can you demonstrate leadership potential and or past leadership experience?
• Do you have a passion for the challenges and issues that your organization will address?
• Are you focused on the actual needs of your customers? Have you interviewed or worked with the people whose needs you are trying to meet?
• Do you hold yourself to a high level of personal integrity and transparency? Are you honest about what you do and don’t know?
• Are you dedicated to systemic change?
• Have you failed, learned from your mistakes, and continued to be resilient?
• Are you impatient? Do you have a strong sense of urgency with making your idea or early stage venture a reality?

Do you have a team and is your team fit for your venture?

If you don't have a team you can still apply, but you will have to give us a thorough explanation of how you are launching this venture on your own. It will be hard to convince us.

• Are all the needed skill sets for implementation of your venture present amongst your team members?
• Has your team worked together in the past or can you currently demonstrate that your team works well as a cohesive unit?
• Is your team uniquely qualified to address the issue you are solving and is your team uniquely qualified to implement the solution?

Is your venture Unreasonable?

• Does your venture effectively meet a social or environmental need?
• Will your venture be able to be financially self-sustaining after 1 year of operations? Is it already financially self-sustaining?
• Will your model be scalable or replicable outside of the country of origin within 3 years of graduating the Unreasonable Institute?
• How can your model be scaled or replicated to eventually meet the needs of at least 1 million people?
• Have you already brought a prototype to market or do you have a proof of concept? (You don’t have to have one to apply).

Do you know what you are doing?

• Have you identified the specific need that your venture is addressing and can you clearly outline how you know that this is an actual need?
• Can you clearly describe the thought process you used from identifying a need to realizing a product or service?
• Can you clearly outline the thought process you will, or have used, to go from idea to actualizing the social venture?
• Have you developed effective metrics to gauge the impact of your product or service?
• Ultimately, will your venture lead to systemic change?

Here are some common reasons applications were not accepted in 2009.

• A social or environmental need was not clearly identified in the application.
• The applicant did not have any direct interaction or first-hand experience with the target market / customer base.
• The proposed solution did not address the root cause of the need described by the applicant.
• The applicant did not clearly define his / her customers.
• The applicant did not provide evidence or a logical argument for why his / her proposed solution would actually meet the needs of his / her customers.
• The applicant did not clearly explain the tangible outcomes and key metrics of his / her proposed solution.
• The applicant did not have relevant entrepreneurial / leadership experience.
• The applicant's team did not have the concrete skills required to launch the venture (e.g. a web-based social venture did not have a web developer on board).
• The applicant did not have a team and did not have a compelling plan for acquiring teammates.
• The proposed solution was charity-based or lacked a concrete plan for financial sustainability.
• The proposed solution was not scalable.