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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.

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!

Acknowledging the rising popularity around environmental and social issues, corporate responsibility campaigns have become very popular in recent years. Companies want to remind consumers what good they have done to promote their environmentally friendly products or to attract and hire new employees. A few of the corporate sustainability, socially-responsible marketing and “social strategy” firms expecting to grow by between 50-75% in the next few months include: Ethos JWT, BluSkye, Brown Flynn, and one of the field’s pioneers, our neighbor across the bay in Berkeley, Natural Logic.(See The Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2007: “Agency Finds Social Responsibility Niche. Ethos Helps Companies Gain Marketing Benefit from Do-Good Efforts”). SVT and HIP Investor are collaborating with Brown Flynn to provide strategic insight on impact measurement and systems.  We’ll be expanding our list of collaborations this fall.
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Thank you to the almost 40 people who joined us at Salesforce.com’s headquarters for the discussion on poverty alleviation and voluntary markets with Sierra Gorda, the Ecosystem Marketplace, Salesforce and SVT.

It was a lively and insightful discussion, but one that we hope is just the beginning of the dialogue. We invite you to use this space to exchange ideas about the next generation of carbon offsets and ecosystem services, to communicate directly with SVT or to think creatively about any of the panelists and their work.

Please note: You’ll have to register (free) to comment on this blog. Follow this link and click register. Give us a username and your email and we’ll send you a password right away.

Thanks again for your participation!

~The SVT Team

Putting a price on poverty and the planet: The new voluntary market for poverty alleviation and environmental services

Two emerging trends in the social capital marketplace are Social and Environmental Return on Investment (SROI) Analysis and the markets for Environmental Services, which build on carbon credit markets. Do these trends create tremendous opportunity, or hamstring progress?

The Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve is the world’s leading laboratory for both trends, and has been grappling with the driving question: how can we compensate the residents of watersheds, forests and jungles for the ecosystem services that they provide and protect? Sierra Gorda has transacted one of the first trades of carbon offsets plus ecosystem services at $15/ton: a premium of $5/ton over carbon alone. Their ambition is to add a super premium product of carbon + ecosystem services + verified poverty alleviation.

Join us for a lively discussion about how the emerging market for this value might harness market forces to improve life.

Requested fee: $10 in advance or $15 at the door

Panelists:

Martha “Pati” Ruiz Corzo, Director of the Sierra Gorda Biosphere Reserve
Ricardo Bayon, Director, Editor-in-Chief of the Ecosystem Marketplace
Samjhana Upadhyay of Ashoka: Innovators for the Public’s Global Fellowship
Sara Olsen, Founding Partner, SVT Group
Corporate executive to be confirmed

Location: The Landmark Building, Salesforce.com headquarters
1 Market Street, San Francisco, CA
This event is open to the public, but space is limited. If you are interested in attending, please contact us at info(at)svtgroup(dot)net or call us

SVT is excited to have teamed up with R. Paul Herman’s newest venture, HIP Investor, in our first expansion into public equity impact analysis. We co-developed a framework that investigates the link between Human Impact and Profitability, and in collaboration with Fast Company have now applied it to 21 Fortune 500 companies. The company analyses are this month’s issue.
We also worked with FC’s web team to enable you to take a quiz to rate your own company’s HIPness. Check out the “Sensible Investing” article and company assessments.
The thesis behind this which I think Paul (the brains behind the HIP acronym) puts extremely well at his HIP Investor site, is that:
1. Human impact drives profit, a new source of value and innovation

2. Impact can – and should – be measured, such as Health, Wealth, Earth and Equality

3. Only those leaders, investors and organizations that pursue this approach will outperform and prove truly sustainable.

You can see the HIP Scorecard (HIP: Human Impact + Profit) and the companies we reviewed, and add your ratings too. Please pass the link on!
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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.]

Welcome to SVT Group’s official blog! We will communicate regularly here on a variety of topics. This blog is designed to allow SVT Group and its affiliates to express ideas, innovations, concerns, events or just about anything that comes to our minds. We invite you to check back often and comment on postings. If you have something you would like to post, please email us at blog(at)svtgroup(dot)net. On behalf of SVT Group, welcome to our interactive world.

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.