Emerge Social Enterprise Conference Oxford 27+28th Nov 2010
After some busy weeks at university, here a short entry on the great Emerge conference at Said Business School, Oxford last weekend.
Great speakers ranging from Sanjit Bunker Roy (see older posts from conference in Zurich) over Tim Smit (Eden Project) and Joe Madiath (Gram Vikas) to Charmian Love (Volans).
Here some excerpts from the official Emerge blog that convey some impressions and results of the conference’s workshops:
The conference was aimed to provide students with practical insights into the field of social enterprise, something made clear in Liam Black’s opening keynote address, when he made clear that the conference was not about defining social entrepreneurship, but the work of actual entrepreneurs and professionals involved in the field.
Every breakout session at Emerge 2010 fell into one of the three categories: LEARN IT, INNOVATION; DO IT, CAREERS; and BUILD IT, SKILLS.
Investing for Impact (funding social enterprises):
Frequent reasons why social enterprises are turned down for funding:
1. A management team — investors carefully look at your team
2. Know your numbers — do your homework, provide investors with evidence for your profitability
3. Understand your market
4. Coachability — don’t defend your venture to death, show that you are willing to learn
Raising start-up capital:
Moderated by social entrepreneur in residence at the Skoll Centre, Matt Scott, Anya Navidski of Jumpstart-up, Inc. and Xavier Helgesen (Better World Books) gave advice around attracting funds and pitching ideas to investors.
One important note from this session:
“If you go to an investor seeking money, you’ll get advice; if you go seeking advice, you’ll get money.”
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Another inspiring note was the keynote address by Tim Smit on Saturday morning. Telling great anecdotes on why he only accepts every third invitation (“the best encounters are those that are not planned during events you did not plan to go to”) he delivered a speech filled with dry British humour as well as a refreshing reminder of the unconventional, the value of the unexpected and a generally positive attitude to life.
Altogether a great conference and definitively recommend for everyone around the UK and beyond interested in Social Enterprise.
Innovative Collaboration Through Hybrid Value Chains
I just read through a great article by Bill Drayton (CEO Ashoka) and Valeria Budinich (Founder Ashoka Full Economic Citizenship Initiative) in the Harvard Business Review (Sept2010).
It focused on the power of partnerships between citizen sector organizations (CSOs) and private businesses, employing hybrid value chains to benefit both CSOs and the cooperating businesses in its design, carrying the potential of large-scale improvements for previously disadvantaged groups in society.
Ashoka Full Economic Citizenship
Let’s consider an example to help understand the idea:
A. Large groups of people are excluded from the formal housing market in Colombia.
B. Enter a collaboration of
1. a for-profit tile-manufacturer (Colcerámica)
+
2. a human-rights-organization (Kairos)
where the tile-manufacturer provides the necessary product+technical and financial know-how, while the CSO adds its knowledge of the local community and problems to recruited a workforce of formerly unemployed women,
=
C. and the end result is a partnership that reduced the distribution costs of the business by more than 30 percent, using part of that profit to pay the female workforce, invest in further community projects and start cooperating with other local CSOs.
Thus the partnership creates value that neither of the two actors could have created without the other, is scalable, and based not on charity or CSR, but sustainable in its profitability to both the women employed, families receiving housing, as well as the CSO and tile-manufacturer.
Concluding, it can be said that the hybrid value chain principle holds vast potential for a transformation of the private sector toward creating sustainable solutions for societal problems in win-win-cooperations with citizen sector organizations.
For more information on hybrid value chains click here and here.
Beyond Profit – New Cambridge Student Society
Today’s post is about an interesting new society of the University of Cambridge called Beyond Profit. Its main function is to be a platform for students and starting social entrepreneurs to meet, share experiences and insights, spread awareness about new developments and offer career opportunities at the intersection of private and social sector.
Just returning from the introductory event I have to say that my first impression is very positive. With intriguing guests such as Pamela Hartigan (Director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford), Howard Chase (Enval Ltd), Neil Prem and Martin Clark (Citylife) for the first workshop on the “Future of Entrepreneurship” organized together with the Centre for Entrepreneurial Learning of the Judge Business School.
On the opportunities side there is an event on “Climate Change and Business” organized by Beyond Profit, bringing together students in a workshop focusing on the relevance of sustainability in a CSR context, led by Nick Pennell, Head of the Sustainability Practice at Booz & Company. Another upcoming event will have Tom Rippin (On Purpose leadership programme) a as guest speaker on “Business and Causes” and the next generation of leadership in business.
Apart from that they are hoping to soon provide regular informal meetings for students of all disciplines to gather and exchange experience, learn from each other as well as network in order to help spread the word of social enterprise and prepare a new generation of changemakers.
Definitely a promising society, worth to keep an eye out for and joining if you’re around in Cambridge!
Switching The Perspective: The Social Intrapreneur
I just came across an interesting post by Omar Garriot on SocialEdge (link), who was intrigued by the issue of changemakers within for-profit corporations and exploring the issue based on a survey amongst his former MBA class.
While finding that most were familiar with the issue of social entrepreneurship (well, it was Berkeley’s Haas School of Management), far fewer knew much about social INtrapreneurship.
Having come across intrapreneurship during my time as intern with Ashoka, I have some idea of it, yet was curious about the discussion of “social intrapreneurship” within for-profit companies. Not least so because of my own quest for meaning in my future professional life.
First a definition of the term as read in the extensive document “The Social Intrapreneur: A Field Guide For Corporate Changemakers” (2008) published in cooperation by SustainAbility, Ideo, Allianz and the Skoll Foundation:
Social intrapreneur,n.
1 Someone who works inside major corporations or organizations to develop and promote practical solutions to social or environmental challenges where progress is currently stalled by market failures.
- Their primary motivation is to incubate and deliver business solutions that add value to both society and the bottom line.
- The emergence of social intrapreneurs is the result of a series of ‘evolutionary drivers,’ including global market failures, shifts in personal motivations and increased societal expectations of business.
- Social intrapreneurs are more ambitious for social change than for personal wealth and advancement
- They are not satisfied with suboptimal equilibriums, where markets work well for some, but not at all for others. Their adept opposable minds exist to juggle dilemmas and catalyze new visions, products, services and solutions.
- Although many social entrepreneurs shun the corporate habitat of social intrapreneurs, they have common traits, particularly when it comes to the motivation to deliver social change.
- Intrapreneurs are adept at fighting and surviving cynicism, caution and the status quo in large corporations.
• identify emerging social intrapreneurs in their organizations;
• support (vs. thwart) the development of their innovative ideas;
• create new forms of business value which benefit the company as well as the wider communities in which they operate
Social Enterprise Mark: No Alternative Badge In Scotland
Following up on a post from early April (click here for more), four days ago, the social enterprise network Senscot has confirmed that they will not advance with plans to set up a second social enterprise mark with different criteria and thresholds than the Social Enterprise Mark introduced by the Social Enterprise Coalition in England at the beginning of the year (Source: ThirdSector).
The decision came out of talks between Senscot and the Scottish Social Enterprise Coalition and formed the end of the debate that started in mid-April between the two Scottish organizations. On April 12, after first criticism from the Scottish Social Enterprise Coalition, it stated:
“The viability of a Scottish identifier would depend on the wholehearted support of our sector,” and that “This decision by our coalition changes things and raises the prospect of a protracted and potentially damaging controversy over an issue which is not central.”(ThirdSector)
To prevent wrangling about the issue, confusing the public and creating conflict within the Scottish borders on the issue Senscot has thus abandoned plans for an alternative badge, yet it keeps the suggested five criteria on its website as informative content designed to stimulate continuing productive discussions around the issue.
The five criteria are:
Criterion 1 – Social Enterprises have social and/or environmental objectives.
Criterion 2 – Social Enterprises are trading businesses aspiring to financial independence.
Criterion 3 – Social Enterprises have an ‘asset lock’ on both trading surplus and residual assets.
Criterion 4 – A Social Enterprise cannot be the subsidiary of a public sector body.
Criterion 5 – Social Enterprises are driven by values – both in their mission and business practices.
Personally, I believe it was a good decision of Senscot to compromise on the issue and not provocate a conflict in the sector on this issue, as although I too would have supported stricter criteria, the circumstance that the social enterprise sector is still comparatively young, priority has to be given to the overall growth and recognition of social enterprises. And after all the criticism of Senscot has already sparked a debate that will now hopefully take its trajectory to discussions of a productive kind, as even when an organisation holds the current Social Enterprise Mark, no-one prohibits it to adopt stricter standard for themselves.
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Apart from this, news of the original Social Enterprise Mark in England suggest a steady rise in social business adopting the Mark. Although the creators were surprised by the amount of criticism after the Mark was launched in February, there now seems to be a steady trickle of applications for the mark. The company expects that in a year’s time, about 2,000 social enterprises will have adopted the Mark (Source: ThirdSector).
Session 5: Authentic Leadership & Concluding Remarks
Photo: Mind&Life /Manuel Bauer
Finally I find the time to complete the series of posts on the Compassion in Economics conference in Zurich from April!
The last session was devoted to questions of leadership for more altruistic economic systems and future directions of research.
4th and last speaker of the day: Sanjit Bunker Roy, from a village in India:
“I got one of these snobbish and expensive educations as you have them in India and in many other parts of the world. I was all set, as it is with Indian families sometimes: my future was all laid out for me. Had a degree and the jobs were ready for me just after I finished my studies.
Finally on Saturday afternoon, more applicable concepts and ideas were discussed. From Socially Responsible Investments over Microfinance to Social Entrepreneurship the speaker were diverse and deeply involved in their areas of expertise.
Antoinette Hunziker-Ebneter, MBA started with the work of Forma Futura Invest, an independent asset management company aiming for responsible investments and sustainability:
Session 3 (2): Warm-glow Altruism, Prosocial Sanctioning & The “Dysmal” Science of Economics
And the conference blog keeps going! Now with the second part of Saturday morning, 10th of April at the Compassion & Altruism in Economic Systems conference in Zurich:
The second speaker was William Harbaugh,PhD, focusing on decision making towards donations and its neural connections in the brain:
Session 3 (1): Lord Layard on Competition vs Cooperation & The Movement for Happiness
Image: Mind & Life
The Saturday morning session of the Compassion in Economics conference in Zurich was devoted to the issue of economic research on altruistic/prosocial behavior, moderated by Gert Scobel (who by the way wrote a great book on wisdom, maybe I find some time to talk about it later in my blog).
I decided to divide the posts on the sessions into more than one post as it’s easier to digest 
. Enjoy!
The session was started off by Lord Richard Layard, PhD, one of the key economists (together with Bruno Frey) to begin research on the relevance of wellbeing and happiness within the discipline:
Lord Layard began his presentation by pointing out the problematic nature of the assumption that free and competitive markets make: that people derive happiness from satisfying their demand for material goods in the market.
Ignoring the fact that non-market relations of people are at least as important, this assumption has lead to a large increase in income (at least in Western countries) but none in happiness. An important part of this problem is that of social comparison, the fact that we tend to not value what we have in terms of the economic comfort it gives us by itself but that we compare ourselves with those around us.
Lord Layard continued to explain that economic is no longer a zero-sum game, Read more…
