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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.

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!

The two nonstop sounds day and night are hammering and honking: people are building and moving fast in Hyderabad, one of the beacons of India’s massive development. I just returned from giving the first of a two-day social impact analysis workshop here with the entrepreneurs participating in the second cohort of the Social-Impact International program. This two-year old incubation program was started by 3 high net worth individuals from Silicon Valley (Charly Kleissner, Eric Archambeau and Peter Wheeler) with inspiration from the Global Social Benefit Incubator they have advised. SI targets enterprises in the Hyderabad region with “proven traction that have the potential to scale significantly and that would benefit from the mentoring, training, consulting, networking opportunities and access to financing” the program aims to provide. It’s free and they’re accepting referrals and applications for next year’s cycle now.

On Saturday was the Asia Semifinals of the Global Social Venture Competition at the Indian School of Business, known around town just as ISB. This school is fast becoming legendary, given that not only is its campus architecture the stuff of the seven wonders of the world, but despite being only 8 years old it has already seen in-person visits by world leaders including George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and is looking forward to a visit this May by Arnold Schwarzenegger with “an entourage of 100″ according to one of the ISB’s entrepreneurship faculty. Excellent choice of a partner for the GSVC! (Although I don’t understand why the new Korean GSVC affiliate chose to send their plans to the semis held at London Business School instead of ISB. Hopefully that will change.) One gets the sense upon talking to ISBers that no door here is not open to them, and as a result everything feels amazingly possible. I’ll report on the winners in another message shortly.
At 9PM on Saturday night after the competition had ended, I took a stroll past a new faculty building whose work crew was in full sway. Elsewhere on campus numerous service crews were busily painting, breaking down (the multitudinous and impressive) GSVC signage, and guarding. I thought what a great, great deal is possible in a place where there’s both so much money flowing, and so many talented people can be put together to work such long hours at such low cost. it seems the future for Indian social entrepreneurship is truly brilliant!

[This posting and related links are also on xigi.]

Last weekend I was invited to Hyderabad, India, by the up-and-coming Indian School of Business to judge the Asia semi-finals of the Global Social Venture Competition. As the de facto (and hopefully one day full-fledged) fourth GSVC partner with London Business School, Columbia Business School and UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, ISB makes the competition truly global at last. We vetted teams from Thailand, Phillippines and several regions in India competed for the chance to attend the final round in New York in April. One last written screening in two weeks will pare the ten teams we selected down to three finalists.
This is my first-ever visit to India, though my seventh GSVC finals. Hyderabad was a lot like I had heard India would be, both in terms of the simultaneously gorgeous and sickening chaos, the traffic weaving through teeming, colorful humans of all ages, and the Sunnyvale, CA-like corporate campuses springing up like a mirage where the city once ended.
What was perhaps most striking of all was that the ventures we saw in this competition were so remarkably similar in their essential themes to many startups we have seen before in the GSVC:
Thailand: a breakthrough water purification technology to treat agricultural runoff
Philippines: organic fertilizer that simultaneously improves the environmental degradation caused by large-scale pig farming
India: Employment of the Marginalized

- a branding, distribution and technical assistance provider that helps local artisans find markets

- a food products company providing supported employment and reintegration for at-risk women who’d been trafficked as sex workers

- an IT company that employs bright, ambitious teenagers from the slums
It would be tremendous if these aspiring entrepreneurs, who are in many cases grappling with very similar missions and industries to those of competitors in years past, could link up with their predecessors and compare lessons learned. Maybe some would be competitors, but this is ultimately still a very big world and I think in almost all cases they would find that they are fighting on different fields for a common cause, and could reinforce one another. SVT is already building a social metrics database, and I discussed with a few of the GSVCers in Hyderabad how we might build this feature into it too. I look forward to developing that possibility.