Most Popular Social Entrepreneurship Posts
SoCap08 Keynote: Matthew Bishop
Published October 14, 2008 @ 09:20PM PT
Matthew Bishop, editor of The Economist’s New York desk, and author of the just-released “Philanthrocapitalism,” just gave a great overview of his understanding of the emerging social capital market space. It basically came down to highlighting a few key trends and conversations we can pick up.
Bishop thinks that the key question of social change is how you leverage relatively small amounts of capital for complex problems. For him, the scarcity of capital for social benefit creation – whether its nonprofit or for-profit funding and talent – means that people who want to tackle social issues need to focus on:
- Increasing transparency. People need the ability to understand how others are approaching social change, and they need to be able to compare their activities in some sort of rational way.
- Capacity building and infrastructure development: We need to stop the fetishization of the ‘reduction’ of overhead in the nonprofit sector and invest in human resources we have.
- Reduce duplication: Bishop thinks the nonprofit has major “filter failure” and organizations that simply aren’t that great limp on forever, often duplicating eachother’s efforts.
Additionally, Bishop had a few insights based on his intensive research. An important one is that he believes that both nonprofit and for-profit actors approach partnerships with one another with mutual skepticism. People from the business sector often behave like they’re dealing with idiots and all you need to fix the nonprofit sector is more business acumen. Nonprofit actors, for their part, think that business folks just don’t understand the nonprofit world at all. He thinks (and I agree) that both need to approach the other with humility.
Finally, Bishop echoed Jed Emerson’s point this morning, that there are problems best solved by the market, and others (he used the example of how to fix the United Nations) where a focus on finding revenue streams could be counter productive. For him, the point is to be able to take a sober look at any problem and figure out what the best path may be – for-profit, nonprofit or something else entirely.
That wasn’t the answer for everyone in the debate that followed. More on that tomorrow.
SoCap08 Wisdom Nugget: The hubris of social change
Published October 14, 2008 @ 11:46AM PT
I'm sitting at the "Design in the Developing World" panel with field giants like Tim Brown from IDEO and Paul Polak, and there was a great little recognition a moment ago about the potential for hubris in social change.
Tim Brown shared that IDEO includes anthropologists, psychologists and other people from a social science background on all of their design teams for the precise reason that they don't think in terms of "what's the solution?" He said that "as a designer, my brain goes straight to the solution and I stop listening to the people I'm working for and miss the important details."
This is an insight, and a recognition of the limitations of a perspective of "problem solving," that should impact the way that every individual and organization involved in philanthropy, development and other fields of social change think about their work.
The process matters, details matter, and there's an important irony around the fetishization of adopting "business models for the nonprofit sector." One of the great disagreements that I hear between nonprofits and consultants who are supposed to help them is around "increasing efficiency." Many people with a business background can't understand why a nonprofit would waste resources with broad-based democratic decision making processes when it possesses the expertise to make decisions.
The reality is that stakeholder engagement that treats the "served" as equal partners in the decision-making process is in the very fabric of succesful social benefit creation. It doesn't matter how good your solution seems if no one cares to adopt it. Sometimes, efficiency isn't about reducing the number of people involved; it's about providing new systems to value their input and "get to yes" together.
Morning Keynote and Plenary: “Silver bullet” or “silver buckshot”?
Published October 14, 2008 @ 11:22AM PT
In some ways, Katherine Fulton’s keynote and the plenary discussion that followed were the intellectual core of this conference. In some ways, both were trying to answer the question: “Just how real is this new 'social capital market,' and where is it going?”
Fulton began by exploring what she sees as a convergence of forces, including: money seeking diversification, values-driven investors and consumers, growing inequity, environmental crisis, and more. The question is whether the market can “take off” or whether it will stay niche?
By way of example, she provided a framework of industry evolution that ran from uncoordinated innovation, to marketplace building, to capturing the value of the marketplace to maturity, and reminded the audience that it had taken microfinance decades to get all the way through marketplace building.
Fulton warned that the growth of the social capital market could be too hard or too easy. Too hard in the sense that there is an insufficient compensation for risk, there may not be enough good deals, execution might prove to be too difficult, and finally that hype creates a bubble. Too easy in the sense that incentives create a major pull toward “greenwashing” and the very premise of having positive impact could by undermined and the industry discredited.
Finally, she shared a number of converging actions that can drive the social capital market emergence ranging from new lobby’s to change government structures to new forms of funding for organizations to scale and grow.
Following Fulton, a panel with Jed Emerson, Matthew Bishop and David Chen continued to explore a similar set of questions. I gotta say, while Matthew and David were great, Jed has an excitement for the space that is both passionate and no-bullshit. He's an essential voice for helping us remind ourselves why we’re here, but also to not take ourselves too seriously. In fact, one of the thoughts he left us with is that to keep the world of social change moving forward, we sometimes need to take a step back from our own egos and perceptions, and recognize that none of us individually has the exact right answer.
Emerson suggested that we’re not looking for a silver bullet; we’re looking for silver buckshot: the package of proven strategies and approaches that make sense for the problems they’re seeking to address.
SoCap08 Entrepreneur Introductions: Rajeeb Dey and James Dailey
Published October 14, 2008 @ 09:28AM PT
I've met a number of social entrepreneurs doing fascinating work, including:
SoCap Day Two
Published October 14, 2008 @ 08:48AM PT
Day Two of SoCap is about to get underway. There are a couple morning plenaries to get things moving, followed by more sessions than you can shake a stick at. I'll be attending the morning keynote with Katherine Fulton of the Monitor Group (who headed up just an awesome project on philanthropy which you should check out), and the plenary that follows with Jed Emerson (of, well, everything blended value), Matthew Bishop (new book: Philanthrocapitalism) and David Chen (Equilibrium Capital). After that I'm hoping to go to sessions focused on everything from ICT for development to African private equity firms. Should be a good day.
Conference convener Kevin Jones said that he hopes that today helps people recognize that this movement is "big, its real, and even in the middle of a massive downturn its still growing. It's a good place to invest your hope (your money and your time)."
Cool thoughts from the social media-sphere
Published October 13, 2008 @ 03:41PM PT
There's a flurry of cool blogging and twittering going on around #SoCap08. Some of the most interesting things I've read so far:
From Sean Stannard-Stockton of Tactical Philanthropy:
Prior to the session I ran into an acquaintence who works for the the Institute for the Future. She was explaining to me that trends take 30-50 years to play out. So the internet was first developed in the 1960’s, but it took 30 years for the internet to go mainstream and yet we’re still likely 10+ years from the internet being fully “mature” in its growth cycle. I think the same is true in social investing. The first socially responsible investment fund was launched in the 1970’s, so we’re now 30 years into the trend. I have the sense (and the panel today was a nice affirmation) that we’re hitting the “knee in the curve” of growth in social investing. But that means that if you compared our industries to the growth path of the Internet, we’re probably sitting at around 1995.
I'm always a sucker for history and understanding trends over time. Its important to remember that this space is emerging from a specific set of antecedents and understanding where things have been can help us understand what's changing.
From the official @SoCap08 twitter account:
SoCap08: R. Paul Herman, HIP: "Walmart and Halliburton aren't all bad. We need to bring them along." That's provocative. What do others think? #SoCap08
R. Paul Herman is the founder of HIP Investor and makes what I agree is a provocative statement. The question is really just how big the Social Capital Market tent is? What does it take for a company to be good? One answer from another SoCapper is the B Corp.
From Francisco Noguera at Nextbillion.net, attending sessions in the "Social Entrepreneur" track:
A quick raise of hands at the start of the panel shows what could be an accurate diagnostic of this sector: When asked how many in the room were "early stage social entrepreneurs," around 80% of the room rose hands. A few minutes later Kirsten [Gagnaire, an advisor with the Social Enterprise Group] asked how many were currently functioning organizations and only a third of the initial hands went up this time.
Sounds familiar, huh?
Tipping Point
Published October 13, 2008 @ 02:46PM PT
Registration has been backed up for hours. People are emailing begging to pay the full $1000+ registration price tag to be included. More than 450 of the 600 attendees registered after the fall of Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch. So much for irrational pessimism.
There is a sense here, not that the market failure dominating the news isn't serious, but that this just might be the wake up call that jumpstarts the conversation about recreating our financial institutions to better understand and value social benefit creation as an integral element of the way we conduct business. Its actually pretty friggin inspiring.
