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Copied wholesale from the Cal press release on NewsBlaze LLC:

The 9th annual Global Social Venture Competition at the University of California’s Haas School of Business. Ten business school teams from the United States, Indonesia, Taiwan and France will present their plans for businesses with both a financial and a social or environmental bottom line.

The finalists’ business ideas range from microbial fuel cells and safe syringes to socially responsible outsourcing to Africa. Plan summaries are online at:
http://socialvc.net/index.cfm?fuseaction=page.viewpage&pageid=237. The business plan presentations are open to the public.

The 2008 Symposium on Social Entrepreneurship will cap off the competition.
It will feature keynote addresses and panels as well as the announcement of and presentation by the competition’s Social Impact Assessment Prize winner, chosen from one of this year’s finalist teams.

- Global Social Venture Competition

WHEN: 8:45 a.m. to 3:45 p.m., Friday, April 18

WHERE: Wells Fargo Room, Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley. A map is online at: http://www.berkeley.edu/map.

- 2008 Symposium on Social Entrepreneurship (registration required)

WHEN:
9 a.m. to 6 p.m., Saturday April 19

WHERE:
UC San Francisco’s Mission Bay Conference Center. A map and directions are online at: http://www.ahl-missionbay.com/directions.cfm.

WHO:
Pamela Hartigan, founding partner of Volans Ventures and founding managing director of the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship, and Jason Green, general partner of Emergence Capital Partners, among others.

BACKGROUND:
The competition was founded by five Berkeley MBA students at the Haas School of Business in 1999 and has since then grown into an international partnership between the Haas School, Columbia Business School, London Business School, Indian School of Business and Yale School of Management.

Thammasat University in Thailand, ESSEC Business School in France, the University of Geneva, Switzerland, and a consortium of business schools in South Korea called Social Venture Competition Korea provided additional support by soliciting MBA teams from their respective international regions.

The Global Social Venture Competition is the largest and oldest student-led business plan competition providing mentorship, exposure and financial awards to emerging social ventures from around the world.

For more information, go to http://www.gsvc.org or http://www.haas.berkeley.edu/responsiblebusiness/2008GSVCSymposium.htm.

Susan Sanderman of Denver just forwarded this fascinating World Clock that shows the current status of major global health, environmental and social statistics, updated in real time.  It’s like an impact dashboard for the Planet!
This kind of ‘impact context’ should be a touchstone for any impact analysis– if focused down to the region where a company or organization does its work,  it makes a great starting point for what the “addressable market” is in terms of any of these social or environmental issues.  Working to prevent biodiversity loss?  Malaria?  Drowning?  Use your impact analysis to say not just, we’re preventing X instances, but also, “Here’s how much our solution will slow it from the current rate of loss.”  That makes it MUCH more meaningful.
World Clock’s makers compiled it from highly credible sources of statistical datasets, but they have not verified any of it and it may be spotty in parts, so it would be worth verifying if you use it.

Michael Edesess, Boardmember of International Development Enterprises (IDE), reports that “The Economist magazine has a highly favorable review this week of my friend and colleague Paul Polak’s book ‘Out of Poverty.’…The book describes the methods that Paul and International Development Enterprises (IDE), the organization he founded, use to help the poorest people in the developing world earn more income.” I’m delighted to see it’s for sale on Amazon, rather than only found on a foundation’s site!
IDE received a $13M grant about a year ago from the Gates Foundation to scale its work, which has allowed Paul, now 74, the time to write. It’s excellent to see a person with so much to teach have the time and opportunity to write up and disseminate his knowledge! I wish so many other social entrepreneurs with great wisdom had the time and resources to document their work. If I were a philanthropist I’d invest in such a library of books– this amazing moment in the transformation of the capital markets should not be lost to history.

For example I’d love to see Martin Fisher of Kickstart, which has been pursuing similar goals with excellence, do a book with Paul where they share and perhaps debate what the both have learned over decades about the nuances and issues of delivering sustainable tools to solve poverty; or Pati Ruiz Corzo of Sierra Gorda and Albina Ruiz of Ciudad Saludable document and debate the differences between their approaches to engaging community members in economically and culturally sustainable protection and restoration of ecosystems. I’m talking about the nitty gritty- how does this stuff really work and what are the hard-won entrepreneurial lessons for people working in the trenches.
Fortunately John Elkington (SustainAbility) and Pamela Hartigan (Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship) have also just written The Power of Unreasonable People capturing some of these lessons learned, but although I have only yet read the book jacket I suspect they’ve gone light on the nitty gritty of their own trench stories, which I think would be fascinating and useful to know– but perhaps I better read it and find out!

Aflatoun: Child Savings International is laying the groundwork to roll out its SROI-based impact assessment framework, which it is calling “AQIS” (Aflatoun’s Quality assurance and Impact Assessment System), and held the first meeting of its Impact Advisory Committee a couple weeks ago.

The meeting was hosted by Greg Dees at Duke, chaired by John Elkington, and included committee members with tremendous experience and skill, including our SROI Guide co-author, Peter Scholten.
The attached outcomes report from the meeting summarizes the discussion and agreed next steps as Aflatoun prepares to roll out a system for measuring its impact as it scales its model to a targeted 100 countries. An excerpt of the key takeaways:

• At the heart of the discussion was the balance between “doing it” and “studying it”, and between scale and quality. The committee has given concrete input to find this balance
• The committee suggested to combine several approaches, including SROI, qualitative research and randomized evaluation, aiming to create a symbiotic strategy
• This combined strategy aims to answer both at organizational and external demands
• The committee has discussed strategic organizational partnerships for a sustainable process of AQIS. Members agree that it is a process of constant learning.

Aflatoun works with schools and other partners to teach the world’s poorest children the discipline of saving, and to build their sense of themselves as capable and responsible citizens of their communities.  Stay tuned for more as they begin rolling this out!

I’m curious what people think about the term, “Bottom of the Pyramid.” It’s descriptive and understandable, but implies a terrifically OECD-centric worldview. Is “Base of the Pyramid” any better? Is there another phrase out there being used that people find to be as sticky and functional?  We kicked off a discussion about this on the xigi blog.  What do you think?

I just got back from the first national summit of the Initiative for Global Development, which was formed after 9/11 “to make the elimination of global poverty a [US] national priority.” The initiative showed truly phenomenal convening power (in order of appearance: Madeline Albright, Colin Powell, John Shalikashvili, George W. Bush, Jim Lehrer, Jim Wolfensohn, Mary Robinson, Ted Turner, Carly Fiorina and Jeffrey Sachs to name only a few) and while I came wondering whether the very high powered business and government people who were convened there would be aware of or would recognize the value of the social entrepreneurial and investing innovation going on out there in the xigi community, given its inherent unconventionality and their inherent conventionality, I left feeling tentatively optimistic. While many there probably do not see this as an emerging capital market yet, many of them definitely have their sleeves rolled up in pieces of it, and through IGD there is an opportunity for the larger group to begin to see the more systemic picture and the roles they can play in relation to it and each other. But, I also left still feeling concerned that there’s a lot of room for unintended negative consequences, since this group has a lot of horsepower, but the execution still lacks any systemic way of either assessing what good and bad is actually getting accomplished, or systematically incorporating the voices of the people the whole initiative intends to help.
What was affirmed from every speaker, not least of whom was Bush himself (at some length no less, and with evident passion), was the notion that it is both a business imperative, a national security priority and a moral necessity to “get on with it.”I thought Wolfensohn and Turner said it best. Wolfensohn painted the situation in big, eloquent brushstrokes which I won’t do justice to now but which went something like: in the next 40 years we’re moving from a world of 6 billion to 9 billion people, and one where Brazil, China and India replace the European countries among the G8, and the growth in the middle class is going to be in the 100s of millions if not billions but almost all of that will be in non-western regions. There’s both an opportunity for continued business growth of our economy here if these peoples’ wealth increases, and an opportunity to avoid the backlash now that they can see on the internet and cable what they have and don’t have relative to us. Not only this, but America has lost moral standing in the world– people don’t dislike us, but they think Americans are selfish. There is an opportunity, Wolfensohn said, to redefine what this country stands for– to restore the nation’s soul. We can think about what is good for business, and what’s good for our kids… and if we do nothing, our kids will have to deal with the consequences of that.
Or, as Turner put it: “let’s stop doing dumb things, and start doing smart things.”
Like I learned a long time ago from Shorebank’s founders (who weren’t at this meeting but who should be next time), the old-fashioned way of doing business used to be that you couldn’t do business in a place where people couldn’t afford to buy your products, or where your products harmed them, so you had to invest in creating the conditions for people that enabled them to do business with you. That kind of business seemed to get lost when the market grew to be international, but now that the world is shrinking again– fast– this gathering tried to remind us that the old-fashioned ethic is true once again.

About a year ago we put out a call to the field for commercialization plans for technologies that could address the MDGs. We imagine there are a lot of technologies sitting around that have made it most of the way through R&D but their developers didn’t or couldn’t bring them to market for some reason– maybe there wasn’t a billion dollar market for it, or maybe it wasn’t in the company’s core competency. We attracted a powerful set of plans and decided to put them in a catalog called “SET MDGs”) last spring to see if we could spur connections between these technologies and the resources to get them into the world.

In the Catalog we played around with what information investors might need to inform a decision whether to fund a social venture. If investors are using conventional criteria, they’re trying to assess the financial risk and return of the deal. To get at this initially, they expect executive summaries to speak to the management team’s strength, the market opportunity, and the proposed solution or technology, so we put that into our new Catalog summaries. If they’re from the new capital markets, however, we imagined they’d also need to understand what the environmental and/or social implications of the deal are… and there are few conventions around how that should be summarized- let alone what the due diligence process would entail.

What do investors in this new capital market need to know in addition to the potential financial risk and return? Like a Sudoku puzzle, there are a few easy boxes to fill. One thing might be a check of whether the impact on the environment will be net positive or at worst zero compared to what would have happened anyway. Another has to be something about the kind of benefits a venture may have, and how likely those are to be achieved. It gets trickier when we drill into each of these, although many people are boldly going…

And then there’s the issue of how to present something that connects with that particular investor’s intuition or chemistry… hard to do on a page, but maybe more doable than we have assumed?