Ideas
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The World's Bravest Thinkers
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Great Minds In Action: TED, BIF, Pop!Tech
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Saturday Smarts: Mashable's List of Great Minds in Action
Contrasting Approaches to Changing the World at The Hub
Published July 28, 2009 @ 10:40AM PT
Last night, the Hub Bay Area kicked off their Hub Innovation Series with a panel discussion between Ben Rattray (founder of Change.org), Steve Newcomb (founder of Virgance) and Matt Flannery (founder of Kiva.org). The event's organizers clearly wanted a discussion that moved beyond platitudes and got into the nitty-gritty of how to create change. Neither they nor the packed audience were disappointed.
Each of the companies in question gives average citizens the ability to be a part of change, but each in very different ways. Kiva allows anyone with $25 to become a credit life-line to a low-income entrepreneur. Virgance launches companies focused on sustainability that use positive financial incentives (carrots) to shift economic behavior. Change.org is a network that uses media to aggregate energy and then partners with nonprofits for advocacy and other sorts of campaigns that rely on many, organized voices.
One of the most interesting conversational subtexts underlying the panel was whether carrots or sticks are more effective when it comes to inducing behavior shifts, particularly shifts in major companies. Ben and Steve actually didn't disagree that both were important, but where they place their time and effort clearly highlights a difference in perspective.
Each of them basically believe that business respond to real financial incentives. For Steve and Virgance, they try to help companies that want to be good by delivering more consumers and clients. Their Carrotmob and 1 Block Off The Grid companies are examples of that strategy. Ben suggested yesterday that he thinks that in today's world, the level of brand exposure that companies have in a social media world makes them particularly vulnerable to pressure from well organized activists. What's more, in his estimation, the huge array of consumer product choices makes the importance of brand even greater, and the importance of protecting brand even more valuable to companies.
It was a great conversation about an important topic. What do people out there think: is the carrot or stick more effective in changing corporate behavior?
TEDGlobal2009 and the Substance of Things Unseen
Published July 21, 2009 @ 02:23PM PT
TED is maybe the best known gathering of creatives in the world. Each year, tens of millions of people watch TEDTalks for free online, but only a few lucky thousand get to attend one of their few events.
TEDGlobal is an annual conference held at Oxford University in the United Kingdom each year, and is meant as a gateway into a world of big ideas and passionate people. The event is just beginning and even from thousands of miles away, I can begin to feel the excitement creeping into blogs, tweets, and the social-intellectual ether. I've got some major, major envy.
I absolutely love this year's theme, "The Substance of Things Unseen." This purposefully open theme is quintessential TED; subtle enough to allow for an incredible variety of conversations, but with a common thread that plays on the imagination.
I have been thinking about "The Substance of Things Unseen" with even more regularity than normal lately. Immersed in the exhilarating chaos of leaving one life to start anew two-thirds of a country away is exactly the type of experience that breeds an incredible reflection and introspection about meaning, purpose, and what's next.
My favorite blog post to come out of the event so far is "The Books of Oxford," a reflection by a frogdesigner about seeing the Magna Carta, a Gutenburg Bible, and some of the other treasures of Oxford's Bodleian library. The post asks what it is about seeing those incredible works in the flesh - despite the fact that almost no one can read them any more and that perfectly good modern translations of the words exist.
For my part, I think it's because history - particularly history of that order and magnitude have a way of making us feel small. Not small in the sense of meaningless, but small in the sense that we are part of something much bigger. That feeling is at once overwhelming and reassuring that we cannot possibly understand or control everything.
TED is ever more active in translating the power of their big ideas to the social realm. This is particularly embodied in their TEDGlobal Fellows, which gives incredible folks like Appfrica's Jonathan Gosier the chance to participate in TED events.
What's more an event so fluid with the ideas of the day cannot help but deal with the enormous magnitude of global problems. In the first day of the event today, surprise speaker Prime Minister Gordon Brown (yes, you read that right) talked about the need for new institutions to combat the challenges we face. His assertion is that pictures, words, and other media have immense power to change the way we think about the world and it's our obligation to harness the full capacity of modern media to make good on that potential.
And that's why I love next year's TEDGlobal theme, announced yesterday. "And Now The Good News" will be all about sharing those stories that paint a very different picture of the promise and potential of the future that we just tend not to hear as much these days.
For now though, enjoy the incredible outputs from what promises to be an inspiring week.
Featuring Steve Wright from the Salesforce.com Foundation
Published July 14, 2009 @ 09:21AM PT
A couple months ago, we featured a guest post by Steve Wright, Director of Innovation at the Salesforce.com Foundation. The post, "Reimagining Value for the Post Crisis Economy," became one of our most popular ever, garnishing nearly forty comments from social entrepreneurship luminaries across the space.
About a month ago, I invited Steve to follow up that stellar piece with something focused more directly on his particular passion for social impact data. As the Director of Innovation at the Salesforce.com Foundation, Steve has had the chance to work with some innovative projects around improving the way we collect and use data to determine our social impact, such as the Acumen Fund initiated PULSE Project.
Steve's new piece, "A Brave New World of Social Impact Data," is an incredibly important rumination on how to better use data to understand and increase our impact. The key graph for me:
As I see it, markets represent the physics of social change. Understanding their rules is critical to approximating an empirical understanding of social impact. At the moment, in the social sector, we operate in two disparate, conflicting marketplaces. The first is characterized by transactions and competition and the second by ideas and collaboration. It is my belief that we need to find synergies between these two markets if we are to create lasting global solutions. To a large extent, in the same way that an individual organization focuses on the change that it can make, the role of the market place is to focus on the change that can be made globally by leveraging the strengths and weaknesses of the network as a whole, both the nodes and the connections between them.
Yesterday we had some technical, and the post was published in incomplete form and under my byline, but we've corrected that now, and you can read the complete work here: "A Brave New World of Social Impact Data."
Check out Steve's older piece, "Reimagining Value For A Post-Crisis Economy," as well.
Steve is one of the many incredible speakers featured at the upcoming Social Capital Markets conference, being held in San Francisco at the beginning of September. In it's second year, SoCap convenes innovators across the blended value space and works to demonstrate the ecosystem emerging around good capital. Check out their full schedule here.
Stories Truer Than The Truth: The Brand of Social Entrepreneurship
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.
Introducing Guests from Net Change Week
Published June 08, 2009 @ 12:24PM PT
A few months ago, I wrote a post called "Web 3.0 and the Emergence of Creative Community Hubs" where I argued that "The most exciting emergent trend on the internet actually isn't on the internet; it's about place, and the explosion of offline community hubs supercharged by online discovery."
One of my favorite things about having blogged here for the last half a year is the chance it's given me to see how communities of social change innovators are emerging around the world. One of the most passionate communities that I've come across is the group of social change and technology thinkers coming from Toronto and the surrounding environs. In particular I've been impressed with the community and thinking around the Social Innovation Generations at MaRS Discovery District:
"MaRS is a non-profit innovation centre connecting science, technology and social entrepreneurs with business skills, networks and capital to stimulate innovation and accelerate the creation and growth of successful Canadian enterprises...Social Innovation Generation (SiG) is a collaboration that fosters innovative approaches to addressing Canada’s social and ecological challenges. The project is designed to provide practical support for social innovators."
This week, SiG@MaRS is hosting "Net Change Week...a week-long event designed to explore how social technology can bolster social change."
Throughout the week, members of the Net Change Week team will be posting videos and other content from the event on this blog and sharing with our community. I hope you enjoy the conversation!
