Social Entrepreneurship Policy
"In Corporate Activism, Authenticity is Key"
News Release, Duke: The Fuqua School of Business
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When CEOs speak out on a social or environmental issue, they should stay true to their personal and professional values and not seek simply to strengthen their brand, leaders involved in corporate activism say. "If we're motivated to do this stuff to burnish our brand, it's now inauthentic," said Kevin Trapani, president and CEO of the Redwoods Group. "If we do this stuff because we care about the outcome and it burnishes or harms our brand, that's the cost of what we chose to do in the first place."Read More Here...
"The Patient Capitalist"
The Economist
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CHAMPIONS of market forces are a glum lot these days, for the most part. But not Jacqueline Novogratz, a market-minded development expert. The current crisis in capitalism, she believes, strengthens her call for a sweeping change in how the world tackles poverty. “The financial system is broken, yes, but so too is the aid system,” she observes. In her view, “a moment of great innovation” could be at hand.
In “The Blue Sweater”, her recently published autobiography, she describes her past frustrations working in such pillars of finance and development as Chase Manhattan bank, the African Development Bank and the Rockefeller Foundation. She found them bureaucratic, distant and condescending to those they sought to help. So in 2001 she set up Acumen Fund, a “social venture capital” outfit, to promote what she calls “patient capitalism”. Read More Here...
"Fertilizer Is Food for the Father and Bad for the Sons"
By John W. Roulac, Be The Change Media
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While the food movement debates the dubious safety of the herbicide Roundup or what role Monsanto or GMOs 2.0 will play, one huge issue—how we create fertility for our food crops—is being overlooked. Nutiva agrees with the Dutch saying that “Fertilizer is good for the father and bad for the sons.” The vast majority of farmers in the United States, Canada, the European Union, and Australia apply anhydrous ammonia, the technical name of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, to their crops. The fertilizers used in Canada and the U.S. run off during rainstorms into streams that flow into rivers that then flow into our oceans. This practice is leading to thousands of oceanic dead zones that include the Gulf of Mexico. Read More Here...
"Deconstructing Sustainability"
By: Jeanne Bell, Jan Masaoka, & Steve Zimmerman, Blue Avacado
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What is sustainability? Most of us in the nonprofit sector are familiar with setting programmatic goals. For instance, we might set a goal of reducing high school dropout rates by 10% in our community, or a goal of increasing the quality of the observations of one hundred amateur astronomy clubs. Nevertheless, we often aren't sure what our financial goals are, or even what they should be. If the financial goal in a for-profit company is to maximize profit, should our goal as a nonprofit be to have $0 profit? Or should the goal be to grow an endowment of $10 million, or to have a surplus of 5%, or a deficit of no more than $50,000? Read More Here...
"Debating the potential of impact investing at Skoll World Forum"
By: Carrie Gonnella, Duke Center for the Advancement of Social Entrepreneurship
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No one can debate that the field of impact investing has exploded in the last decade, with billions of dollars committed to various impact investment vehicles, and increasing research into financial and social returns. But has impact investing been oversold, or will it live up to the hype?
Attendees of the Skoll World Forum in Oxford, UK had the opportunity last week to hear a lively debate focusing on this and other important questions including, are expectations of market rate returns unrealistic? How can we best assess impact? Read More Here...
"Differentiating Entrepreneurs from Small Business Owners: A Conceptualization"
By: James W. Carland, Frank Hoy, William R. Boulton, & Jo Ann C. Carland
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Schumpeter (1934) was among the first to identify the entrepreneur as an entity worthy of study, distinct from business owners and managers. He described entrepreneurs as individuals whose function was to carry out new combinations of means of production. To Schumpeter, this function was fundamental to economic development. Entrepreneurs, therefore, warranted study independent of capitalists and business managers. Today there continues to be an implicit assumption that the entrepreneur contributes disproportionately to the economy of a nation, yet little has been done to isolate this individual for further analysis. Extending the theory of Schumpeter, who argued that an entrepreneur was distinguishable both by type and by conduct, two conceptualizations are proposed in this paper: one for differentiating entrepreneurs from small business owner/managers and the second for differentiating entrepreneurial ventures from small businesses. Read More Here...