By Vallent Ferdinand | Management, Faculty of Economics and Business, Universitas Komputer Indonesia

A Student’s Reflection on Spotting Opportunity in a Crisis

On June 4th, 2026, the rupiah slipped to its weakest point against the US dollar in Indonesian history. For most people scrolling past that headline, it was just another economic statistic — a red arrow on a currency chart. But a few weeks later, walking through Pasar Kosambi in Bandung, I saw what that red arrow actually looks like in real life: a vendor telling me that customers who used to buy a kilogram of something now only buy half. A tofu maker complaining that soybean prices had climbed so fast his margins were nearly gone. A neighbor quietly switching brands, buying less, cutting corners nobody would notice unless they were paying attention.

That contrast — between the abstraction of “depreciation” on a screen and the very concrete choices people make at a market stall — is exactly what pulled me into looking closer at this issue through a PKM-RSH (Program Kreativitas Mahasiswa – Riset Sosial Humaniora) lens. This piece is my own independent reflection, as a Management student, on why this kind of research question matters — and why I think it points toward something bigger than an academic exercise: a genuine entrepreneurial opportunity hiding inside an economic crisis.

The Problem With Looking at Only One Variable at a Time

The question worth asking sounds technical at first: what is the simultaneous relationship between monetary variables (rupiah depreciation, inflation, interest rates) and real variables (food prices, purchasing power, household consumption) in a single city — Bandung? But the reasoning behind it is refreshingly practical.

Most existing studies test one variable against another in isolation — for instance, how exchange rates alone move consumer prices, without weighing that effect against inflation or interest rate movements happening at the same time. Research on Indonesia’s inflation dynamics has shown that exchange rate depreciation carries one of the strongest effects on the Consumer Price Index, alongside global food and energy prices (Arintoko et al., 2024). Other work has confirmed that currency shocks pass through fairly directly into consumer prices (Achsani & Nababan, 2008).

Both are useful findings. But treating each variable as its own isolated experiment misses something entrepreneurs instinctively understand: real markets don’t move one factor at a time. A soybean importer isn’t only affected by the exchange rate — they’re squeezed by inflation, credit costs, and consumer demand all shifting together. A statistical method called canonical correlation analysis is built specifically for problems like this, measuring how a whole cluster of monetary variables moves together with a whole cluster of real-economy variables. It’s less like asking “does A affect B?” and more like asking “how do these two teams move as a system?” — which, frankly, is the question any founder trying to price a product in an inflationary market should be asking too.

There’s also a scale problem worth mentioning. Most of the existing literature studies these dynamics at the national level, which is useful for setting central bank policy but nearly useless for a mayor’s office trying to decide where to send a subsidy truck this month. National averages can hide the fact that one city’s inflation is running far above the rest of the province — which, as it turns out, is exactly Bandung’s situation right now, with food inflation reportedly the highest in West Java. A method that works at city scale, using data specific to that city’s markets, closes a gap that national-level research simply cannot.

The Paradox That Changed How I Think About Consumer Behavior

The part of the literature review that surprised me most wasn’t about currency markets at all — it was a decades-old idea from economist James Duesenberry. His Relative Income Hypothesis, proposed back in 1949 (Duesenberry, 1949), argues that people’s spending isn’t purely rational or purely tied to what they currently earn. Two forces shape it instead: a demonstration effect (we tend to copy the consumption patterns of people around us) and a ratchet effect (once we’re used to a certain standard of living, it’s psychologically hard to scale it back).

Applied to Bandung today, this theory explains something that looked contradictory at first: why do people keep spending on non-essentials even while food prices climb and wages don’t? The honest answer, based on this framework, is that what looks like “resilient consumption” might actually be debt, or what economists call consumption smoothing — borrowing against tomorrow to maintain today’s lifestyle, rather than a sign of healthy purchasing power.

As a business student, this reframed a question I hadn’t thought to ask: if consumer spending data can lie about the actual health of a market, then any entrepreneur reading raw sales numbers during a currency crisis might be building a strategy on a false signal. That’s not just an academic footnote — that’s a real risk for any small business trying to read demand right now.

Where the Research Becomes an Opportunity

This is the part I find most exciting from a KWU (Kewirausahaan) perspective. Research like this isn’t only meant to end up in a journal — it can become the seed of a genuine business or social innovation, and I think this line of inquiry quietly points toward at least three directions worth exploring.

• First, there’s a clear gap in localized economic intelligence. City governments currently respond to price shocks with blunt instruments — blanket subsidies and discounted markets (World Bank, 2013) — because they lack granular, real-time data on which specific variables are driving the gap between rising prices and falling purchasing power. A data analytics service built for local governments and cooperatives, translating research methods like canonical correlation into a simple dashboard, could turn a six-month academic study into an ongoing decision-making tool. Existing evidence suggests that subsidy programs work far better when they’re accurately targeted and delivered quickly (Bah et al., 2019) — which is exactly the kind of precision better data could support.

• Second, there’s an opening for protective financial tools aimed at small producers. Bandung’s tofu and tempeh makers are effectively unhedged against soybean price volatility that is largely driven by currency movements outside their control. A simple, cooperative-based price-stabilization fund or a micro-hedging product — something far less complex than a commodities derivative, more like a shared insurance pool among producers — could directly address a vulnerability this research quantifies.

• Third, there’s room for consumer-facing financial literacy built specifically around the Duesenberry paradox. If part of the purchasing power crisis is genuinely about households not recognizing when “keeping up” has quietly become debt-financed, then a lightweight budgeting or awareness tool — even something as simple as a social media education campaign on inflation and household spending — could carry real social value beyond a grade or a publication credit.

None of these ideas require abandoning the rigor of the research. If anything, they depend on it — you can’t design a smart subsidy tool or a fair hedging product without first knowing, empirically, which variables actually move the needle.

Why This Matters Beyond One Semester

I think this is the honest lesson PKM-RSH is trying to teach, even if it isn’t stated outright in the guidelines: research and entrepreneurship aren’t separate tracks. A well-designed study doesn’t just produce a paper — it produces a validated understanding of a real problem, which is precisely the raw material every founder needs before building anything useful. Most failed startups don’t fail because the team lacked ambition; they fail because nobody tested whether the underlying assumption about the market was actually true.

Walking through Pasar Kosambi again after finishing the literature review, I noticed things differently. The vendor still talked about half-kilogram purchases. But now I could connect that single conversation to a much larger, testable pattern — one that a rigorous method like canonical correlation analysis could actually help explain, and one that, with the right execution, could become something more than a research finding. It could become a product, a policy tool, or a small business that protects people like that tofu maker the next time the rupiah falls.

That, to me, is the real intersection of Kewirausahaan and Riset Sosial Humaniora: not choosing between solving a problem and studying it, but recognizing that studying it properly is very often the first, necessary step toward solving it.

If there’s one takeaway I’d hand to another student staring at a currency headline and feeling powerless about it, it’s this: a crisis is data before it’s an opportunity, and it’s an opportunity before it’s a business. The order matters. Skip the first step and you’re guessing. Do the work, and even a rough, student-led research project can end up pointing toward something worth building.

References

Achsani, N. A., & Nababan, H. F. (2008). Dampak perubahan kurs (pass-through effect) terhadap tujuh kelompok indeks harga konsumen di Indonesia. Jurnal Ekonomi dan Pembangunan Indonesia, 9(1), 1–16. https://doi.org/10.7454/jepi.v9i1.2212

Arintoko, A., Badriah, L. S., & Kadarwati, N. (2024). The asymmetric effects of global energy and food prices, exchange rate dynamics, and monetary policy conduct on inflation in Indonesia. Ekonomika, 103(2), 66–89. https://doi.org/10.15388/Ekon.2024.103.2.4

Bah, A., Bazzi, S., Sumarto, S., & Tobias, J. (2019). Finding the poor vs. measuring their poverty: Exploring the drivers of targeting effectiveness in Indonesia. The World Bank Economic Review, 33(3), 573–597. https://doi.org/10.1093/wber/lhx020

Duesenberry, J. S. (1949). Income, saving, and the theory of consumer behavior. Harvard University Press.

World Bank. (2013). The World Bank Group and the global food crisis: An evaluation of the World Bank Group response. Independent Evaluation Group, World Bank Group.