svtgroup.net

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.

Our friend Paul Herman sent this fabulous Squidoo list of 71 (and counting) Carbon Calculators, which Natural Logic’s Dave Jaber and Mike Wallace of Wallace Partners stocked.  You can rate your favorite!  Great place to start figuring out your contribution to global warming and how to minimize and offset it.

A dispute over a European emissions-trading proposal has caught U.S. airlines and airplane makers by surprise, spurring them to launch a public relations blitz highlighting their green bona fides, even if most of their work has been aimed at boosting their bottom lines. (See The Washington Post, July 28, 2007: “U.S. Airlines Under Pressure To Fly Greener; Carriers Already Trying to Save Fuel as Europe Proposes Plan”). Nancy N. Young, the new vice president of environmental affairs at the Air Transport Association, U.S. carriers’ main trade group said “We know that it’s coming here. . .Aviation has lost the public square in this debate. We need to do a better job of letting people know that our environmental interests are directly aligned with our business interests.”

It is evident that people inside and outside of the U.S. airline industry are looking at what is going in other parts of the  world, Europe in particular, to address environmental concerns, specifically global warming, and show that environmental interests are real interests that need to be addressed in every sector.

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The New York Times (July 6, 2007: “In London’s Financial World, Carbon Trading Is the New Big Thing”) reported that within three years carbon dioxide trading has become very popular in London’s financial world. It noted that managing emissions has become one of the fastest-growing specialties in financial services, and companies are scrambling to find workers – their goal is a slice of a market now worth about $30 billion and that could grow to $1 trillion within a decade. More carbon was traded in London than in any other city – this is largely the result of a decision by European governments to start limiting the amounts that industries emit. Numerous investment banks are increasing the numbers of staff on their emission trading teams to keep up with this expanding market. Prospects for the industry are good, especially if the United States joins the Europeans in establishing a trading system.

Since carbon dioxide trading has become very popular in the London financial market and as a result companies are looking to expand their emission trading teams, we should continue to monitor this trend as it will likely spread to markets outside of London and become a big industry. It is evident that the financial world is finding environmental issues to be useful and important when evaluating businesses.

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I am delighted to see AMD’s new marketing campaign using the latest SROI analysis techniques to express the full range of value their energy efficient servers deliver!
They do it using the whole range of information types: sheer dollars (over $1bn and, on their dynamic billboard, counting up like a lottery prize amount), colorful, qualitative description (poster on a bus stop stall, “you could’ve chilled all the oaky, buttery Chardonnay in Napa” with the energy savings)… I’m rooting to see them name the amount of emissions that could have been avoided!