Social Enterprise at Seedcamp?

categories: Incubators and CoWorking Spaces, Social Media

Published September 11, 2009 @ 04:19PM PT

Tis the season for venture incubators, pitch days, and business plan competitions of all shapes and sizes. Seedcamp, a funding incubator for young startups in Europe has just announced it's 21 finalists. In the mix are a number of organizations that have, if not explicitly social missions, implications for the social sector. These write-ups come from VentureBeat.

"Patients Know Best (Cambridge, UK) — An online platform for patients to send secure messages to their doctors and nurses, receive information about their health, and get advice on preventative and followup care." It's pretty obvious how this one could improve the way that people accessed health care. I'd be interested to see how this aligns or doesn't with something like FrontlineSMS:Medic.

"Teachable (London) — A library of teacher-made resources in any academic subject that are easily adapted to curricula." Again, the social value here is pretty clear. The potential of the internet to democratize access to education is immense and as yet relatively untapped. I love the idea of teachers being able to contribute to a communal database.

"VouChaCha (London) — Platform that delivers coupons and discount vouchers straight to your smart phone." This may not seem profound, but with the economy as it is, people care more about collected small discounts than ever before. Being able to deliver offers direct to the phone could be wonderful.

I think these companies are good examples of a new ecosystem of web-driven platforms that, while not "social enterprises" in the way we define it in this sector, are still building infrastructure to help address people's problems in simpler, easier ways. It's important for us in the social entrepreneurship space to be connecting our conversations to the consumer web world and looking for ways to leverage the relationship.

(Photo: Leafar)

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I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

Patricia

http://dataentryjob-s.com

Posted by Patricia Carter on 09/11/2009 @ 10:52PM PT
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I recently came across your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I don't know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.

Patricia

http://dataentryjob-s.com

Posted by Patricia Carter on 09/11/2009 @ 10:53PM PT
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Thanks for posting this Nathaniel and you are right about the social enterprise link: the first funding we had was a social entrepreneurship grant from UnLtd.

http://blog.patientsknowbest.com/2008/10/30/we-won-our-first-grant/

Posted by Mohammad Al-Ubaydli on 09/12/2009 @ 01:22PM PT
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Author

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.