Resource Friday: ClearlySo's Glossary of Social Innovation Terms

Published June 26, 2009 @ 10:54AM PT

There is a lot of jargon surrounding social entrepreneurship. Sometimes, I don't even know how to describe the field itself. Social enterprise? Social Entrepreneurship? Blended Value? Social Capital Market? I end up using the word "space" a lot to describe the field because it is so amorphous and shifting.

Just discovered via @Montero this glossary of terms by ClearlySo, an "online marketplace for social business, enterprise, and investment," based in the UK. It's already an increasingly comprehensive directory, and has inputs so that people can add new terms. A sample:

This is important because often the first step to collaboration is speaking a common language, or at least understanding how to translate related terms. For this "space" to keep growing, resources like this will provide the bedrock.

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Comments (4)

I'm glad you wrote about this. Words and a common language are crucial for building a movement of any kind. But there's even another wrinkle when it comes to social entrepreneurship and other "social" terms--the terms intersect with the world of social media. So, that creates even more confusion.

And now some tech companies have started using the phrase "social enterprise" for their products.Here's something I wrote about it:

http://trueslant.com/annefield/2009/06/22/microsoft-and-other-tech-firms-usurping-the-social-enterprise-name/

Anne Field

Not Only for Profit

http://trueslant.com/annefield

Posted by Anne Field on 06/26/2009 @ 11:57AM PT
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Great Post!

Posted by Sharif Ibrahim on 06/28/2009 @ 08:56PM PT
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I am amazingly pleased you picked this up! We drafted the glossary over 18 months ago and felt it ould really help people. Until you and @Montero came along nobody ever said they noticed it--we kept updating it hoping it would prove in time to be a useful resource. Would love to turn it into a wiki or some such in due course.

Lots more on the site we have invested in--slowly people are finding the stuff. For example, at http://www.clearlyso.com/blogs.jsf is a list of many relevant blogs and at the bottom our own "ClearlySo in..." trips to social entrepreneurs in faraway places (e.g. Georgia, Armenia, the Balkans, Argentina, etc). I think Romania will be next. There is lots more as well.

Thanks so much for the post.

Best, rod

Posted by Rodney Schwartz on 06/29/2009 @ 10:16AM PT
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Bureaucracy Kills Motivation

Posted by Amal Korrida on 06/30/2009 @ 02:43PM PT
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Nathaniel is the founding Director of the Center for Global Engagement at Northwestern University, which works annually with hundreds of students in dozens of countries around the world through curricular programs and student project incubation.