SocEntHolla!

It was the eighth Skoll forum, and the eighth I have been lucky enough to attend. Like my visit to India a few years ago, it was a love/hate experience. It was a complete nightmare trying to get access to the event, even though the SocialEnterpriseLive team wanted to blog, video and generally spread the Skoll learning as widely as possible to our 20,000-strong network. But when we eventually managed to penetrate the ivory tower and secure a ticket (only for two of the three days, mind), I was lucky enough to spend my time there in awe of most things and people that I saw and heard – Jeff Skoll himself, photojournalist Nick Danziger, Vagina Monologues creator Eve Ensler, singer Annie Lennox, ex-Prime Minister Gordon Brown, and Rockefeller Foundation president Judith Rodin, to name just a few.

Philadelphia is a big market, has the infrastructure of other leading regions for social enterprise and, oh, the city has a lot of problems.

That’s the value proposition coming out of an event organized last week by the Knight Foundation, the Delaware Valley Grantmakers and Technically Philly and held at the University City Science Center. Spurred in part by a post from this author, the event brought together more than 30 leaders in the region’s nonprofit, investment and socially-focused entrepreneur communities.

Kicked off by a presentation by Cheryl Dorsey, the president of the celebrated New York City-based social enterprise foundation Echoing Green, the event featured a large group discussion and then smaller breakout sessions on how the region might further its reputation for the effort.

(Dowser)

Beverly Schwartz, the author of Rippling: How Social Entrepreneurs Spread Innovation throughout the World,serves as Vice President of Social Marketing at Ashoka.   We caught up with her just before the launch of her new book.

(Guardian UK)

With thousands of pubs closing every year, the co-op model is slowly taking off. Could it save the industry, asks Andrew Bibbly

An unusual investment opportunity has just become available in the small Suffolk village of Charsfield. Faced with the closure last summer of the much-loved Three Horseshoes, a group of local people have come together to try to reopen the village pub, this time as a co-operative-run enterprise. Their share prospectus to raise the £250,000 or so needed to purchase and refurbish the building was launched in March at a party at the village hall.

The campaign to bring back a pub to Charsfield is being led by Froth, the Friends of the Three Horseshoes, which has created a community benefit society, registered under the Industrial and Provident Societies Act (IPS, the traditional co-operative legislation). Villagers are now being asked to put money as well as time into the initiative by joining and buying the sharesL: £250 is the minimum requested, £10,000 the maximum. The share prospectus suggests this is not just philanthropy: the Three Horseshoes has a viable future as business, Froth claims, provided turnover can be increased slightly from £90,000 to £100,000 a year.

(Social Edge)

From Potential to Action: Bringing Social Impact Bonds to the US

In 2011, almost 50 years after President Johnson declared a “War on Poverty,” the Census Bureau reported 46 million Americans living below the poverty line. That people are still struggling suggests solutions are not reaching everyone who needs them. Enter the Social Impact Bond (SIB), a new approach to help scale proven solutions to social problems.

Although currently piloted in only one site, the Social Impact Bond is generating a great deal of interest. For that reason, McKinsey & Company recently reviewed this new approach. Our upcoming report, From Potential to Action: Bringing Social Impact Bonds to the US will be released later this Spring.

What is a SIB?

Social Impact Bonds are not a debt investment despite their name. SIBs are a multi-stakeholder partnership that can help government transition from existing remedial programs to higher-impact, lower-cost preventive solutions. Structured as a pay for performance contract, SIBs shift the financial risk of implementing a proven, alternative program from government to investors. This allows government to bring alternative social programs online while keeping existing programs stay in place. The new program is selected to deliver taxpayer benefits and broader benefits to society such that government will eventually transition from existing remedial programs over time.

(Wamda)

Young entrepreneurs with an idea for changing the world may want to apply to Zeitgeist Young Minds, a competition to find 10 pioneers and innovators aged 18–24  from across Europe, the Middle East and Africa who are changing the world by working in science, arts, entrepreneurialism or social activism. 

Winners will get the chance to attend Google’s Zeitgeist 2012, an exclusive three-day event, where over 400 influential business leaders and visionaries from around the world come together to share their perspectives on global issues. Speakers have included Professor Stephen Hawkings, Burberry CEO Angela Ahrendts and Google Chairman Eric Schmidt and CEO Larry Page.

Univetica offers new solutions to help you transform your business into an engine for positive social change.

San Jose, CA (PRWEB) March 30, 2012

Univetica's new social entrepreneurship solutions make it simpler and easier than ever to transform a traditional business into a social business. Social entrepreneurship is the innovation and creation of a venture that harnesses the power of business to generate positive social change. A social entrepreneur is an agent for such change-a new wave businessperson for the 21st century. While traditional entrepreneurs often migrate toward business to generate profit, serious socially-minded entrepreneurs place improving the world around them as their primary fiduciary, even sometimes at the expense of higher profits.

Just as maximization of monetary value motivates traditional entrepreneurs, optimization of social value serves to motivate this new class of businessmen and women. Social entrepreneurs have been known to bring first-world health care tools to people neglected by all but the most dedicated non-profit enterprises. They find ways to rebuild economies in war- or disaster-plagued areas, establishing commerce which not only serves a community's goals of economic growth, but its social goals as well. Some notables in this area have even gone on to establish institutions which encourage and assist in the growth of social business ventures such as select community-owned banks, media companies, and membership associations.

(Triple Pundit)

A cleansing wave of corporate reform is washing over America. One by one, states are adopting new legislation that gives corporate directors legal protections for making decisions to maximizestakeholder value in addition to shareholder value. These new corporate structures are spawning an ecosystem of entrepreneurs and investors eager to build firms that simultaneously scale profits and social or environmental impact.

I am a social entrepreneur. My current venture, Spud Flower, is a Flexible Purpose Corporation (FPC) with a mission to enable economic mobility for our nation’s youth. Spud Flower’s social platform engages family and friends to help children save for college. Our FPC structure allows us to make a profit and make decisions that will maximize social impact. This dual-honed mandate has a gravitation pull that attracts top talent as co-founders, employees, and advisors; and provides access to a growing army of social impact investors while also persuading potential partners to accept meetings they may not ordinarily consider – often, these same people become advocates.

(Forbes)

In a brief interview with Maura O’Neill, Chief Innovation Officer and Senior Counselor to the Administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), we discussed the creation of her position, pioneering examples of social innovation, and the role of social entrepreneurship in international development.

Rahim Kanani: How did your position of Chief Innovation Officer for USAID come about, and why is this role so important for the future of the agency?

Maura O’Neill: When Administrator Rajiv Shah became the head of USAID, he appointed the first Chief Innovation Officer because of his focus on identifying ways to drive faster, cost-effective development results that would last.  This is important because former Defense Secretary Gates said it is a lot cheaper to achieve our US Foreign policy objectives to development than having to send our military troops overseas. Innovation can help ensure that our tax payer dollars achieve the best results.

Rahim Kanani: What are some model examples of innovation in development that you can point to and say, “wow, the world needs to know about this”?

(Huff Post)

What a lunch. Jeff Skoll, first president of eBay and founder of The Skoll Foundation, and I sat down this week with the six newest Skoll Awardees for Social Entrepreneurship, here in Oxford, England. We're in town hosting the Skoll World Forum -- some call it the Davos of doing good -- our yearly gathering of social entrepreneurs, funders and partners from around the world. Greeting the group, and eying his plate, Jeff said: "You social entrepreneurs are used to overcoming obstacles -- how about this lasagna?" We all dug in.

Pasta is not the highpoint of the Forum. Every year for the past nine we have taken this moment to give the Skoll Award to a total 91 extraordinary individuals in 74 organizations, including Root Capital, CAMFED, and Kiva. We are not just handing over a trophy. We are celebrating the impossible. The men and women who run these organizations have proved social entrepreneurship is truly viable: the facts, scale and impact of their ventures tell the story. Our job now is prove social entrepreneurship undeniable, irrepressible, irrefutable. This is not a rogue branch of entrepreneurship, it's the new tree.

(Dowser)

(Justmeans)

Budding social entrepreneur Olivier Nizeyimana has started a bus company called Volcanoes Transport Company, where one of its core values is making sure the buses are always on time. Nizeyimana managed to start his company because he found someone who believed in his business dream and understood his vision of buses being punctual; he met the boss of the company Akagera Motors, the exclusive representative of Toyota Corporation in Rwanda, who helped him get things off the ground.

(Business Week)

Entrepreneurship is the one of the most popular clubs at U.S. business schools these days, and the field is gaining momentum. As more educational institutions dive into social entrepreneurship, we’d like to share with them and their students one of the primary ingredients for turning promising ideas into success stories.

With more than a decade working with field-based social entrepreneurs from the developing world through our Global Social Benefit Incubator, we feel our mentorship program is the secret sauce.

(Forbes)

(Wamda)

Desmeem’s “D-Factor” Day witnessed scores of Lebanese designers of all stripes trying out at the Babel Theater stage this past weekend for a chance to partake in a cross-cultural competition examining the “design thinking process" in the Middle East.

(Tribune, Pakistan)

KARACHI: 

As we are all aware, Pakistan is lagging behind other countries on economic growth. GDP of countries like China and India is growing two to three times our current growth rates respectively. For the standard of living of any nation to improve, GDP must grow significantly higher than population growth which currently is not the case in Pakistan.

In all emerging economies, it is the private sector which has driven economic growth and entrepreneurship is a fundamental building block coupled with favourable government regulations and support.

Entrepreneurship is an act of individuals who utilise their innovation, finance and business acumen to transform a new idea into a value added venture. New ideas coupled with management and leadership skills, gives birth to new businesses which drive employment, capital formation and creation of wealth in the country. This in turn helps reduce unemployment, eradicates poverty and is a hope for a better life for millions of young and aspiring professionals.