Social Entrepreneurship

Silicon Valley, Boston, and the Importance of Social Density

Published October 31, 2009 @ 01:41PM PT

Despite the power of the internet to accelerate communication and connect people across greater distances than ever before, social density - the depth and diversity of connections in a geographically concentrated area - still has incredible power to determine business innovation and success.

Yesterday in my post about the Huffington Post's Philanthropy Game Changers, I noticed that six out of the ten participants were based in the San Francisco Bay Area. There is a selection bias towards technology in the nominees, which explains the concentration to some extent, but that just brings up the question of how the Bay Area became the place where technology innovation is concentrated in the first place.

There's a great historical piece today on TechCrunch about how Silicon Valley became the leading light that it is, and in particular, why Boston - arguably the technology leader for most of the second half of the 20th century - slowly slipped behind northern California as an innovation hub.

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Vote For Philanthropy Game Changers on Huffington Post Today!

by Nathaniel Whittemore

category: Competitions and Fellowships

Published October 30, 2009 @ 05:47PM PT

The media network Huffington Post is identifying the folks in a variety of fields who are changing the shape of their industries. In ten different areas, they've nominated 10 "game changers," and it's up to the masses to decide who is really changing things.

They've just opened the voting on the Philanthropy game changer and there are some familiar faces:

Matt Flannery: founder of microlending portal Kiva

Perla Ni: founder of Great Nonprofits, a rating and review site for people to share their feedback about civil society organizations

Ben Rigby, Jacob Colker, Sundeep Ahuja: founders of The Extraordinaries, the new platform for translating spare time into social action

Lucy Bernholz: Philanthropy blogger and expert who is constantly pushing the field

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Unreasonable Institute Launches $150,000 "Village Fund"

by Nathaniel Whittemore

category: Competitions and Fellowships

Published October 30, 2009 @ 10:08AM PT

The Unreasonable Institute has just updated their website with an announcement that they are partnering with First Light Ventures to launch a $150,000 fund for participating entrepreneurs at the upcoming social innovation incubation program. Perhaps most interesting is the fact that the money will be allocated not by the venture investors but by the entrepreneurs themselves.

I've been following UI for a while. They're one of the most complete social incubator models I've seen, explicitly taking best practices from programs like Y Combinator and TechStars, which use mentorship, training, and investment to launch new technology startups.

This funding marks a major milestone for the viability of this idea. After spending some time with the folks behind the project, I've been confident about their model of curriculum and mentorship for a while, but there is something fundamentally different about the value they can provide to their entrepreneurs, and in turn, the investment the entrepreneurs are likely to invest in their community.

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New Twitter Lists Function A New Way To Discover Social Innovators

by Nathaniel Whittemore

Published October 29, 2009 @ 11:01AM PT

Twitter has started rolling out it's much anticipated "lists" feature for all users today.

Twitter lists give any Twitter user the ability to create a sub-group of the people they follow based on some specific affinity, such as "social entrepreneurship." The list then acts as a filter for that user, so they can just see updates from that group, rather from all of their followers.

Importantly though, lists are public. What this means is that when I create a list of social entrepreneurs, other people can see and even follow that list. Anyone who follows the list has the ability to see the full stream of tweets from people on the list, even if they're not following member of the list.

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How Your Leader's Expertise Can Become Your Company's Weakness

by Nathaniel Whittemore

categories: advice, Leadership

Published October 29, 2009 @ 09:36AM PT

What's for sure is I'm a web guy. I run one technology startup, I manage a big chunk of another. I spend a huge part of my time keeping track of what's happening on the web, and I even do front end web design.

So why is it that one of the major weaknesses of my old Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern was our crappy web presence? I think It's a lesson in how the individual strengths of a leader can become the organization's weakness.

First the back story. I graduated from Northwestern in 2006. That year, I founded the Global Engagement Summit (GES) - a student run community development and social entrepreneurship training program - and the Center for Global Engagement, a study abroad program design center. I spent the next three years building CGE (CGE) and helping GES take root as a student organization.

Throughout all of this, I always had huge schemes for the websites. Functionality, design - it was all quite innovative. Unfortunately, for some reason we never really got past the "our website is just a blog" stage. It was fine, it delivered the information we needed, and we did a good job not spending money on something that wasn't going to be great. But it was still pretty lame.

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For-Profit Social Startup Capital: The Missing Middle?

by Nathaniel Whittemore

categories: Funding, Government and Social Entrepreneurship

Published October 28, 2009 @ 03:38PM PT

In a post on the new Huffington Post Impact section, Catchafire founder Rachael Chong laments the lost opportunity of the US Social Innovation Fund to support for-profit social entrepreneurs. The post begs the question of where the "missing middle" of capital for for-profit social entrepreneurs will be found.

Rachael points out the irony that the Social Innovation Fund isn't currently conceived to support for-profit social ventures , considering that a number of the advisers to the fund and the parallel Office of Social Innovation are high profile proponents of the good that business actors can do.

From my understanding, the decision to focus the government's foray into supporting social ventures on the nonprofit sector has a lot to do with what legislator's were comfortable with. It was a compromise made in order to get the necessary support and buy-in to pass the legislation authorizing the Social Innovation Fund.

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Equations for Failure

by Nathaniel Whittemore

Published October 28, 2009 @ 02:17PM PT

[Editor's Note: This guest post was contributed by Shalyn Hockey, VP Operations at Assetmap. Shalyn had the chance to spend yesterday learning lessons about failure and success from some of Web 2.0's big names and has summarized what she learned below.]

Entrepreneurs throw around ideas, all over the place, all the time. It's necessary. Some ideas are brilliant, but most are not. Some come too soon, others too late. All entrepreneurs hope to find the idea that is the rose among the thorns, the one that will launch them to virality and an IP0.

But the key is discerning the difference between the truly disruptive ideas and the ideas that are simply bad. Disruptive ideas flip the status quo and write new industry rules. Facebook, Twitter, Google, PayPal, Amazon, all seeded with disruptive ideas. At the onset disruptive and bad ideas may look similar, so the value for entrepreneurs is recognizing fail prone ideas at their onset.

Yesterday 25 seasoned entrepreneurs gathered at FailCon in San Francisco, and bravely took the plunge into vulnerability and shared their experiences of failures. Sounds depressing? Not quite. In reality it was fairly inspiring because people can make failure work for them. They learn and adapt and do it better next time. But that's the wisdom that you can find in any inspirational self-help book. FailCon showed something different beyond how to turn failure into success - it evidenced patterns in all these stories of failure. And as mathematics teaches us, where there are patterns there are equations. And where there are equations, there may be some method to the madness. Knowing when things fail may make it easier to notice and avoid fail prone ideas. So here are my ten equations for failure: