The Daily Entrepreneur: SRI and Syllabi

by Nathaniel Whittemore

Published July 02, 2009 @ 11:10PM PT

Venture Investing, The Socially Responsible Way: The Wall Street Journal publishes an interview with City Light Capital's Josh Cohen about his approach to social investing.

Illinois State to be first to offer service learning major: Illinois State becomes the first public university to offer a degree program in service learning, with an option concentration in social entrepreneurship.

Social Entrepreneurship Syllabus: Nathan at Compassion and Politics puts together a syllabus for teaching social entrepreneurship.

Preteens Build Top Selling iPhone App

by Nathaniel Whittemore

category: Young Leaders

Published July 02, 2009 @ 09:34AM PT

A great little article published by Inc. Magazine yesterday tells the story of Finn and Owen Voorhees, 9 and 11 year old brothers who recently designed an iPhone application that became one of the top selling apps.

The application was pretty simple. Called MathTime, it's a math drill program that allows people to practice their math skills in a rapid paced, fun environment. Owen taught himself how to do the coding and had his younger brother Finn design the logos in Photoshop.

Of the experience, Owen said: "I thought it would be cool...It's really cool to make something work, to make a little money, to do something like this and see it up..It started booming...I woke up and I was like, I'm an entrepreneur now."

I like this story for a couple reasons.

First of all, it's such an affirmation of the creativity and capacity of young people. If you encourage them to explore instead of boxing them into stereotypes of what they can achieve, amazing things can happen.

The other piece of this though is how different it is for these young creatives to have a platform for their work. Photoshop and the Apple App store coding platform gave them the tools they need to build something; the App Store gave them a place where they can be affirmed for their good work and where they value they created could be accessed by others.

This is one of the powers of technology that I've been most excited about. I've had the lens of an extremely precocious younger brother to see just how both hardware and software can unleash creativity.

I think it's worth thinking dilligently about the platforms for socially impactful creativity we encourage with young people as well. I love that groups like Do Something and Ashoka Youth Venture promote, reward, and highlight exceptional work of young leaders, but I want to see that facilitation of youth creative towards social problems institutionalized in schools across the country.

Are there good examples of where this is happening?

Stories Truer Than The Truth: The Brand of Social Entrepreneurship

by Nathaniel Whittemore

categories: Branding and Marketing, Ideas, Meta

Published July 01, 2009 @ 04:27PM PT

What is truer than the truth? The story.

So began Isabel Allende at her TED Talk in 2007. Paraphrasing the Jewish proverb, she was saying that the stories we tell about ourselves and our lives often reveal as much about us as any facts ever could.

This has always been clearest to me in music. The early American folk ballads that were adapted from the Old World and which would become the root of country and popular music almost invariably had dueling escapism and morality. They told stories of abberational (and unacceptable) behavior that, in their telling, made people feel liberated, if only for a brief few minutes. For every action though there was a consequence, reinforcing not only the dominant morality but the strict structure that allowed social groups to survive the brutality of early colonial life.

A great example is "The House Carpenter," a famous folk ballad (originally British) that has been peformed by everyone from Natalie Merchant to Bob Dylan. In the song, a long-lost lover returns to a woman who has settled with her carpenter husband and new baby and entices her to run off to sea with her, leaving her family behind. What seems like a grand adventure quickly turns sour. The woman becomes despondent, weeping for her child left behind. As she drowns metaphorically in her sour, the ship springs a leak and literally sings, ending her life.

In it's particular combination of escapism and morality, "The House Carpenter" reveals a huge amount about the mores of Appalacian society in the 18th century where the contemporary form of the song was popularized.

But stories are not just codified in contemporary culture; they are often explicitly created to generate a particular response. This is, of course, what we call branding. Brand's help people form an emotional connection with something, and can often quite literally change people's perception of a thing. I recently heard a great story that reinforced this point.

The cousin of a friend of mine was traveling with the Grateful Dead a couple of decades ago. Having run out of money to buy tickets to the shows, he began tie dying and selling t-shirts outside of each new arena. By mistake, however, he had only purchased XXL t-shirts to sell. For a few shows, he was completely unsuccessful. But then it doned on him to call them "Jerry-sized," connecting them with the portly and beloved Dead frontman Jerry Garcia, and quickly sold out.

This all matters for this blog because we are in the midst of major branding shifts. Of course many are trying to better calibrate the brands of their organizations with the value they're creating - from the social impact on whatever issue they're working on to the experience for staffers and volunteers involved.

Perhaps even more importantly, however, we have a branding opening in the social enterprise space. Just what to call this is still up for grabs: social enterprise? Social entrepreneurship? Blended Value Social Capital Markets for Good?

We converse about definitions, but perhaps more time should be spent on brand implications. What if capitalism just was social enteprise? What if we rejected the fracturing of social, environmental, and financial value? What if we said that the real abberation were corporations that didn't care about all of their impact? What if we said that every person should be viewed as someone with talents to cultivate, grow, and direct? What if we said that every resource should be stewarded rather than exploited? And what if we build structures to reinforce that?

Those are the real implications for the branding of our movement. I'm thrilled to see groups like BeDo, Endeavor, Acumen Fund, and the Social Capital Markets folks who are telling that story, but I want to see it biggified. I want to tell the story of how individual entrepreneurs fit into larger ecosystems. I want to tell the story of where we want to go, not where we are. I want self-fulfilling prophecy of a better, more just, smarter, more sustainable system.

That's the story we must make truer than the truth.

Photocredit: Nyaong on Flickr

The Danger of Too Much Information

by Nathaniel Whittemore

category: Dissent

Published June 30, 2009 @ 10:12AM PT

frog design's Nick de la Mare wrote a really great piece the other day about the danger of over information. In short, he suggests that as the streams of information around us become overwhelming, we begin to find ways to filter, sort, and avoid things we dont feel add real value. The danger becomes that we, to use his words, "chose too narrowly." He starts with a great historical discovery, a quote from a newspaper in 1893 about what the world would look like 100 years later:

In 1893 the Newark Ohio Daily Advocate ran a series of articles predicting what the world would look like in a hundred years. "Every person" they said, "of fairly good education and of restless mind writes a book. As a rule, it is a superficial book, but it swells the bulk and it indicated the cerebral unrest that is trying to express itself. We have arrived at a condition in which more books are printed than the world can read. This is true not only of books that are not worth reading, but it is true of the books that are. All this I take to be the result of an intellectual enfranchisement that is new, and of a dissemination of knowledge instead of concentration of culture. Everybody wants to say something. But it is slowly growing upon the world that everybody has not got something to say. Therefore one may even at this moment detect the causes which will produce reaction. In 100 years there will not be so many books printed, but there will be more said. That seems to me to be inevitable."

His point is, of course, that while we're not all writing books, we're all Tweeting, Status Updating, and broadcasting ourselfs constantly, in the process, congesting the general cognitive space with far more bits and bytes than anyone can handle. The question becomes: what happens next? The natural tendency is to find ways to filter. Indeed, new business models are being born to help people better filter and discover the information they actually care about. The problem, and the paradox as de la Mare puts it, is that in a world of so much information, it becomes easy to just select that information which confirms our own understanding of the world, never challenging us to think differently.

The huge number of information streams before us gives the power to choose only those that are agreeable, to reinforce our culture and values at the exclusion of the new and uncomfortable. One of the nice things about standing under a waterfall of information is that you are forced to engage with viewpoints and perspectives you wouldn't have chosen on your own.

It's a great piece, and an important reminder of the underside of the information age.

Watch President Obama Meet With Nonprofit Leaders Today

by Nathaniel Whittemore

Published June 30, 2009 @ 09:41AM PT

Echoing Green and Civic Ventures Purpose Prize winners will be among those in attendance at an event hosted by President Obama at the White House today to discuss the administration's approach to supporting social entrepreneurs and other innovative nonprofit leaders.

Information about the event is pretty limited, but according to the America Forward blog, "This afternoon at 2:00 PM ET, President Obama will highlight innovative programs that are making a difference in communities across the country.  He will also discuss the importance of searching outside Washington to find and expand successful community solutions, and challenge foundations and philanthropists to join in this effort."

I'll be interested to see whether this is an event which actually shares some specific details of how the administration plans to engage civic leaders. Details of just what the Social Innovation Fund is going to support and how the Office of Social Innovation will run are still somewhat sparse.

The event will be streaming live from the White House at 2pm Eastern Time. Check it out here.

Update: Just ran across this podcast with Office of Social Innovation leader Sonal Shah and others from the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

The Daily Entrepreneur: Toilets and TV

by Nathaniel Whittemore

Published June 29, 2009 @ 08:29PM PT

In Conversation with Jack Sim, World Toilet Organization: I've been really enjoying the Singapore Entrepreneurs blog, and this post about social entrepreneur Jack Sim is no exception.

BBC Series on Social Entrepreneurs: An exciting announcement from the Skoll Foundation about an in progress documentary series about social enterprise and entrepreneurship.

#SocEntChat: the Twitter Chat on Social Entrepreneurship: Ashoka Tom writes a guest post about the monthly social entrepreneur chat he started (and graciously allowed me to co-host). This month's theme: mobile.

Bill Drayton on Harvard Business Ideacast

by Nathaniel Whittemore

Published June 29, 2009 @ 08:25PM PT

Ashoka's Digital Strategist and all around great guy Tom Dawkins alerted me to this interview with Ashoka Founder Bill Drayton on Harvard Business Ideacast.

It's a great interview, particular for people who are just starting to learn about this world. One of the things I like about it is that it discusses how groups like Ashoka are working to build the infrastructure to support social innovators and entrepreneurs. That emphasis on getting the plumping right is something that I think is immensely important and valuable.

Another important part of the conversation is Drayton's argument that it was in some ways an accident of particular historical conditions that the creation of social value diverged from the creation of economic value, and that we're in a point in history now where the citizen sector has matured enough that socially-focused entrepreneurs can achieve the same sort of productivity levels as their business sector counterparts.

All in all, a must listen.