Xerosphere

"What, after all, has maintained the human race on this old globe despite all the calamities of nature and all the tragic failings of mankind, if not faith in new possibilities and courage to advocate them."

-Jane Addams

After two wonderful years, we're formally announcing that there will be no more regular posting on the Social Entrepreneurship blog on Change.org. It's been quite a ride.

***

About half way through college, I began to hear a new term all around me. It was "social entrepreneurship," and the idea, at least according to this book "How to Change the World," that everyone was reading, was that there was a new group of changemakers who were not wedded to the dogma of the past and were finding innovative ways to combine business and nonprofit know-how to tackle the world's biggest challenges.

The concept was like a brilliant spark for many of my peers. We were part of an incredibly lucky group who had had the chance to see the world up close much earlier than generations before us. Social entrepreneurship felt like an approach to change that could learn from the failures and successes of past development strategies to create something more scalable and more sustainable.

Of course, social entrepreneurship was not, in 2004, new. The field had decades of history, and heroes who were building an infrastructure long before there were any cover stories to reward them. But if the groundwork was laid in the past, it is in the last half decade that the field has really come into its own.

For the last two years, this blog has been covering the accelerating cultural importance of "social entrepreneurship." We've covered the brilliant innovators who are reshaping fields as diverse as health and access to finance. We've looked at the trends shaping investment and the development of new metrics. We've watched the Obama administration's foray into the social innovation space. And we've always tried to cover the critics and skeptics who wonder about the hype and efficacy of this nascent movement.

If one theme has stood out more clearly than any, it is just how young the field remains. However exciting or alluring it seems in print, the social entrepreneurship space is growing in fits, kicks, false starts, flops, failures, and improbable successes. It is messy, chaotic, incomplete, and still wonderfully full of possibility.

One of the joys of covering the field from Change.org has been that this company is, itself, an embodiment of the challenges and opportunities of startup social ventures. What began as a Facebook for social change advocates evolved into a media hub for important causes and continues to develop as a platform to coordinate the most important collective action campaigns in the world.

Over the next few months, Change.org will be increasingly focused on its mission of channeling people into high-impact collective action campaigns. We've seen how powerful it can be to get 1,000 people to email a local mayor or business, and learned how to help our readers enact change in real time. Yet with this evolution, the time is right to refocus on actions and specific cause areas, and end our more general coverage of the social entrepreneurship field.

There is still much to accomplish in this movement. While I've loved working with our writing staff to build this community, my belief is that to truly unleash the power latent in the growing network of social entrepreneurs, we need better tools to help people harness their social capital.

My full time focus will be on building Assetmap, a platform designed to transform the way individuals and teams use the resources in their networks to support one another. I'll be moving my writing under the company blog, and covering topics like social capital, the psychology of teams and giving, and more.

I believe wholly and absolutely that we've barely scratched the surface of the importance of social entrepreneurship. This field carries with it not simply innovative organizations, but also an entirely new way of conceptualizing value and organizing business and society. For champions of a world in which companies and nonprofits are partners in enabling equality, opportunity, and human rights, our story is just beginning and time is on our side.

I'm glad to have spent the last two years sharing some parts of that story with this community of readers, and I can't wait to see what the future will hold. Thanks to all the writers and Change.org staff who have made this journey possible.

To follow my next steps, visit http://blog.assetmap.com or sign up to be the first to know when Assetmap is available.

(Ed. note: This is a guest post by Yury Lifshits. Yury is a Research Scientist at Yahoo who has done extensive research into market models. We're thrilled to republish this piece on the changing nature of public goods, which was originally published on his blog).

There is a new trend in the tech industry: making money on public goods. Until recently, public goods were viewed as an area of philanthropy. Now entrepreneurs, investors and corporate leaders see the business opportunity there. This essay gives a basic tour around the market of public goods. We cover the definition, core business models and future areas of growth.

What is a public good?

One can classify goods by the following two criteria: rivalry and excludability. A good is rival if its usage by one consumer reduces availability to others. In contrast, non-rival good can be used by every consumer in parallel. If a producer manages access for every user individually, the good is called excludable. Non-excludable goods are available for everyone interested. Thus, we get four groups of goods:

• Private good (rival and excludable): iPhone, Toyota Prius.
• Common-pool good (rival and non-excludable): Customer support, water in a river, conference rooms in an office building.
• Club good (non-rival and excludable): Cable television, Windows 7.
• Public good (non-rival and non-excludable): National defense, roads (excepting toll roads), GPS Satellites, Wikipedia.

In this essay we use the term public goods more broadly than in classic economics settings. Namely, we consider voluntarily non-excluded goods and nonrival-before-congestion goods to be public. Public goods are produced in a number of areas: city infrastructure, education, law enforcement, peace, safety/security, energy, environment, health, food safety, social security, employment, transportation, tourism, mass communications, and financial systems. In this essay we will have a look at the concept of public goods enterprise (PGE) - an organization that produces non-rival non-excludable goods at profit.

Comparing public goods to other concepts

Let us recall the definitions of several related concepts. Non-profit is an organization that does not distribute profit to its shareholders (all money are reinvested in operations and development). Charitable organization is a non-profit that serves some charitable purpose, in many cases helping those who can not help themselves. Charitable organizations are eligible for certain tax benefits. Social enterprise is entrepreneurial organization (i.e. typically for-profit) that is committed to make a certain change of philantropic nature. Emergent venture is a subclass of social enterprise that is characterized by tech-based approach, focus on enrichment needs, business sustainability and small-to-medium scale.

How does this compare to public good enterprise? Well, PGE can be both for-profit and non-profit, as it only characterized by its product and not by the profit spending mode. PGE can produce both charitable goods (e.g. documentary about food safety) and luxury products (GPS sattelities). Public goods market is the overall ecosystem of supply and demand of non-rival non-excludable products. Non-profits, charities, social enterprises, emergent ventures as well as for-profit corporations can all be players in this market. We use the name public good enterprise (PGE) to describe any entrepreneurial entity on public goods market. The key common challenge for PGEs is to find means to produce freely available goods.

Public goods have several prejudices associated with them. The first one is that selling public goods to governments (and to foundations) is hard and corruption is typically involved. Of course, there is certain truth to that. However, some governments are genuinely looking for vendors of public goods. Some foundations make it simple to pitch them. We get better marketplaces to sell public goods. And corrupt governmental suppliers are still looking for subcontractors. At second, public goods are associated with charity and non-profit. It is not encouraged to make a fortune on saving African kids from AIDS. However, public goods is a much broader category than just survival needs of poor people. Think about city fireworks or a web-based fine payment system. One should think about a public good as a regular product with an indirect business model. Finally, sponsor-based business model does not reached mainstream status in technology sector. On the other hand, sponsorships and donations pay for fine arts, performing arts, museums, education, environment protection and event industry. Public goods need sponsors. So the tech industry will eventually embrace sponsor-driven products.

Business models

To produce public goods an enterprise needs to raise startup and R&D funding and then to find a sustainable source of operating revenue. There is a number of options for startup funding. To begin with, there are generic VC firms as well as VC firms with specific focus on public goods (Omidyar Network, Good Capital, Unreasonable Institute). Secondly, one can bootstrap from foundation/governmental grants. Then, there are special loan programs, like the one that was received by Tesla. Finally, public good enterprise can receive significant non-monetary investment in terms of volunteer help, media support, free facilities, technology and data donations.

Non-rivalry and non-excludability of public goods leads to so called "free rider problem". Everyone looks for others to fund the creation of public goods. As a result, public goods are underproduced. There are three primary ways to approach this problem and establish operating income for PGE:

• Pledge-based mechanisms. In this case, the producer of public goods sells directly to future users. A producer can set a threshold and ask for commitments. If the total amount of commitments exceeds the threshold, the production of public good is started. Kickstarter enables fundrising campaigns of this type.
• Pooled money. Another approach is to pool money from a community members to a single source. Then this proxy organization decides how to spend the pooled money for producing public goods. Governments, non-profit foundations, industry associations, chambers of commerce and home owner associations are typical examples of this approach.
• Complementary products. A producer of public goods can also fund its operations through selling additional products. For example, World Wildlife Fund (WWF) is selling the rights to use its panda logo for commercial purposes (e.g. on credit cards) in order to rise funds for nature conservation programs. Selling name rights is another common scheme (e.g. Sloane Business School). Mozilla funds the development of Firefox browser by auctioning the default choice of search engine. Finally, public goods can follow freemium (PBWorks, gitHub) or ad-supported (Google Search) business models.

The opportunity

It is likely that demand for public goods will grow over the next few years. We see the increase in foundation money (e.g. "Giving Pledge" movement), developing countries become richer, corporations embrace the concept of corporate social responsibility, citizens of socialist and authoritarian countries (Sweden, North Korea) are giving their governments large shares of GDP to be spent in public interest. A for-profit enterprise has a lot of advantages in this market. It can invest in technology and people and attract large venture capital. Working on public goods means working on big problems: jobs, education, environment, health, transportation.

There are two emerging clusters of web-based public goods. The first one is marketplaces. CharityNavigator connects donors and charities, Kiva connects lenders and entrepreneurs, Kickstarter connects artists and supporters, CatchAFire connects volunteers and charitable projects, Alter Eco connects farmers with fair trade buyers, Spot.Us is crowdfunding platform for investigative journalism. The second area is knowledge publishing. KhanAcademy and SupercoolSchool publish lessons, Ushahidi aggregates crisis reports, Wikipedia organizes encyclopedic knowledge, TED shares big ideas, OpenCongress makes law-making two-directional process and Ashoka profiles best social entrepreneurs. Other areas not far behind: mobile applications, e-government, payment and financial systems, social networks and communication systems.

Predictions for the market of public goods

• Better markets for public goods. The biggest barrier for producing public goods is the cost and complexity of sales to governments and foundations. Ideally, selling/buying public goods should be as easy as 1-click experience at Amazon. Existing procurement systems have a lot of room for improvement. We need specialized modern marketplaces for selling technology solutions to local governments, large public organizations (schools, hospitals), industry associations. DonorsChoose and Kickstarter are promising examples in this direction. We need a centralized market for corporate sponsorships. The public history of past spending would be very useful to identify sponsors of future products. Finally, a system to track demand ("wishlists") for public goods should be created.
• Sponsor networks. Like in advertising-supported media, the task of fundraising/selling to governments and the task of making public goods tend to be separated. Naturally, we will have sponsor networks, affiliate networks, large foundations and large governmental contractors who are good at collecting money. In turn, these entities will transfer most of the money to the layer of producers. While the first layer is under "be non profit" pressure and is subject to corruption, the second layer can focus on the actual creation of goods.
• Metrics and measurements. The easier it is to measure the public benefit, the easier it is to sell it. We need more metrics and quality control solutions in the areas of education, environment, and health.
• Improved venture funding. Some venture and seed funding is already available to public goods enterprises. Hopefully, we will see more such sources in the future.
• Increased spending for public goods. Another important direction is to allocate government/corporate/foundation budgets for funding creation public goods. In particular, we need more transparency and centralization around corporate social responsibility programs. Right now, raising corporate sponsorship requires a lot of legwork and personal connections. Another opportunity is to connect public goods spending to new tech clusters (Skolkovo, Chile, Boulder). Channeling technology demand to these places will bootstrap the ecosystem, attract talent and venture capital.
• Low cost public goods. Because selling to governments and foundations is hard, and because there is no liquid market for public goods, the prices are very high. Thus, an important direction for innovation is to deliver the most standard public goods at the lowest price possible (as Walmart and EasyJet do in case of private goods).
• Connected community. One of the reasons why Silicon Valley is not contributing much to public goods is the long distance to Washington DC. Public goods industry will succeed if we connect tech cluster, government/foundation cluster and user cluster (education/environment/health needs). Silicon Valley entrepreneurs should travel to places were public goods are in highest demand. We need conferences, education programs, role models, best practices, directory of existing activities and players. It would be great to have a tradeshow where tech industry showcases available products to governments and foundations.
• Private goods companies to enter public goods sector. Private goods companies like Apple, HP and Sony accumulate enormous talent and technology assets. When they work on public goods (e.g. Apple iTunes U or Google PowerMeter) they consider it to be a philanthropy rather than business. As a result, these teams are underfunded and the projects are underdeveloped. Once we have a more efficient market for public goods, the contribution from these companies can reach the next level.

Takeaway lessons

1. Public goods is a great opportunity for the tech industry. As the market for private goods gets more competitive every day and large corporations seize the control over most profitable areas, it is time to shift technology ventures to the market of public goods. There are huge opportunities in the areas of healthcare, education technology, environment protection, governmental data, employment marketplaces, and financial systems.
2. The nature of public goods dictates the choice of business model. If your product belongs to the category of public goods then your revenue sources are direct sponsorships, governments, foundations and complimentary products. At the times, ad-supported business model was driving most of innovations in the web industry. Now it is time for sponsor-driven technology. Public goods are private goods. While a good is public with respect to end-users, it is still a private good for sponsors, foundations and governments. It is especially true for local public goods (knowledge translations, tourism marketing campaigns). Therefore, the regular business practices can be used. Customer development just becomes sponsor development.
3. The progress in public goods technology is tied to improvements of the marketplace. Once we will have a unified market for selling/buying public goods and widely accepted impact metrics, the speed of innovation increases dramatically.

Thanks to Preston McAfee, Michael Schwarz, Bjoern Lasse Herrmann, Ivan Davtchev for reading drafts of this. Contact me at @yurylifshits or yury@yury.name.

Photo credit: jurvetson

I just saw The Social Network and was struck by one moment in the movie that everyone in the theater loved: Mark Zuckerberg gets an idea so great that he runs outside in sandals through the snow. He hesitates for a second in the cold and then keeps going. I think it was so well received not just because it was funny but because people identified with it.

Everyone knows that moment where you say: “Oh crap, I shouldn’t have done that. Forget it, I’m doing it anyway.” Aaron Sorkin did a brilliant job of making sure every audience member identified with Zuckerberg and it happened the moment he became human; the moment they saw his passion, his risk-taking in a silly way that made them think of what would motivate them to do the same thing (unconsciously), and the story unfolded with everyone invested. Mark Zuckerberg’s level of entrepreneurial risk-taking and genius may be unattainable for most of us but we can resonate with passion so great that we do something that seems a little stupid.

I asked some of the social entrepreneurs in my social network: What makes you run through the snow in sandals? Here’s what they said:

• "The many people with autism desperately needing to be respected in society makes me run as I think I can provide hope and meaningful jobs." - Thorkil Sonne, Founder of Speciliasterne and Specialist People Foundation
  
• "The possibility of empowering and making a difference to other people." - Ashni Mohnot, Founder and CEO of Enzi

• "The prospect of a world-changing venture and everything that comes with it – the risk, the excitement, the potential… in many ways startups parallel love." - Cody Simmons, Founder and President of CO-Fund
  
• "The idea that a smart, hard-working young woman in Peru or Vietnam or somewhere else had to drop out of nursing school because she couldn't get $700.  In the grand scheme of things, it's not that much money.  It's just that, in most developing countries, no one believes students are worth a loan." - Kushal Chakrabarti. CO-Founder and CEO of Vittana
  
• "The awe of a great vision and the happiness of coming one step closer overshadow every physical restriction." - Bjorn Herrmann, Principal of Supercool School (and promoter of literally running through the snow in sandals)

• "I was ironing when I decided we were using the wrong bottle design to buy household products. Fear + excitement filled me. 4 years later, Replenish is a reality." - Jason Foster, Founder/CEO of Replenish

The journey may take years, and the idea might come to you while you're doing a mundane task but I think everyone can agree that it all starts with a step in the "right" direction, whatever that is for you. As for Zuckerberg, we may think we know what motivates him to follow his passion. But a young billionaire who drives an Acura, rents a modest house, and makes a $100M gift to a school to which he has no personal connection  is hard to predict. He is not a stereotype and neither are you.

Howard Thurman, spiritual adviser to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., phrases this blog’s title another way: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” What makes you run through the snow in sandals? What makes you come alive? Go do it.

The conference is the tip of the PopTech iceberg, and what lies under the surface is a series of "unconventional collaborations" in which the organization staff find creative ways to bring dissimilar and disparate actors together in order to see how their different perspectives and resources can amplify and augment one another. They've announced two more of their collaborations during the event, demonstrating some of the best experimental impulses of the network.

PeaceTXT: Violence is rampant in urban areas like Chicago. A few years ago, epidemiologist Gary Slutkin began to wonder if the spread of violence looked like (and could be stopped in similar ways to) the spread of infectious diseases. The result was an organization called CeaseFire, which uses a network of community members as "violence interrupters." These community members are usually people with a sorted past who have seen the long-term results of violence, and can speak from experience that it just isn't worth it. The organization has produced amazing results, reducing homicides in some places by more than 75%.

The challenge for CeaseFire is to figure out how to meet the incredible demand for their services, successfully scale up, and even think about how to apply their model in new settings, such as combatting international terrorism. To explore whether there is a technology opportunity to help them, PopTech connected CeaseFire with the folks behind FrontlineSMS and Ushahidi. The teams have spent the last few months getting to know one another and brainstorming ways that technology can improve CeaseFire's work. If they figure something out, it would truly be a radical collaboration -- CeaseFire could hardly be more focused on real, local relationships and credibility.

Own Your Future: Again coming out of the PopTech Accelerator program and anchored by organizations from the Social Innovation Fellows program, Own Your Future is a collaboration between PopTech and the Brooklyn Community Arts and Media (BCAM) high school. BCAM is a highly innovative school that uses creativity and digital multimedia to engage students in a more significant way.

Own Your Future is a program that will help students make money from the creative works they produce. While the exact mechanisms haven't been figured out yet, the core of the program will be a one year experience that includes entrepreneurship training and financial literacy. Money that students make from their works will be put in savings accounts that they gain access to upon graduation.

These sort of collaborations are the hallmark of the PopTech network. I think both of them have huge potential not just for the actors involved, but as demonstrations of broader opportunities.

Photo credit: kk+

One of the opening sessions of PopTech was entitled "How (Not) to Change the World," and featured speakers like Mulago Foundation director Kevin Starr and Water for People founder Ned Breslin discussing the failures of development, and how to do it better. One of the things that I was struck by was how much of the problem was a failure of design, yet at the same time, how few people in the development space would label it as such.

Almost any organization working towards local or international development is in the business of designing products or services that are designed to change or amplify some behavior towards a certain goal. New diagnostics technologies are designed to shift how diseases are discovered and stopped. Sports for youth programs are designed to shift young people's perspective about team work and their ability to achieve. Agriculture support programs are designed to give rural farmers new tools or strategies to increase their crop yields. And the list goes on.

While these are all very different contexts, each of these programs require a design process in which the organization in charge figures out what behavior they're trying to change, which levers for change to focus on, and which resource, cultural or other constraints dictate the boundaries of the designs they can use.

These processes tend to be shared across just about all the domains of social change. Determining a theory of change, or more prosaically a desired shift in behavior. Understanding the array of constraints that face any environment in which a service or product will be deployed. Looking at the models that exist and the opportunities for innovation that could shape the product or service to be designed. While the manifestation may be different, together these questions and considerations comprise a design discipline.

Yet most nonprofits and international development organizations don't think of themselves as designers. And they certainly don't think about themselves as potential clients for design firms. There is an extreme lack of knowledge and recognition of "design" as a field of managerial and creative consulting that could dramatically reshape social impact outcomes.

I think part of this gap is simply the newness of "design" as a management discipline in general. It has really only been in the last couple decades that firms like IDEO have demonstrated that major companies can employ external design services to advance their offerings. This is still diffusing across the commercial world, not to mention the nonprofit world.

But I think part of it is an implicit or explicit feeling of possession on the part of nonprofits that leads them to believe that they should be able to do all of this on their own. After all, its their experience right? Their connections. Their ideas. Their approaches. What this fails to understand is that the function of design services is about helping organizations apply the discipline of thinking through product and service design to those things they already know, have and understand.

There is some hope that lack of understanding of design services for development are changing. Catapult Design, Project M Lab, Project H Design and more are blazing the way. But there's still a long way to go, and I hope the market for these services grows.

One of the central questions in the growth of the field of social entrepreneurship is whether the term and framework of "social entrepreneurship" will persist, or whether we will look back and see it instead as an intellectual and organizational movement that influenced other fields without becoming one on its own. The annual PopTech conference in Camden, Maine suggests that the question might be a "both/and" rather than an "and/or".

PopTech is a network of cross-disciplinary thinkers and doers with a creative problem solving and social innovation. Throughout the year, PopTech convenes actors from different fields to work together on significant challenges, and the community is anchored by their annual conference in Camden, Maine.

The conference, which I'm attending this week, runs four days and is replete with talks, performances, and unexpected social encounters. While content appears king from the outside, however, the conference is also the seat for two of the most innovative parts of the PopTech platform, their Social Innovation Fellows program and their Science and Public Leadership Fellows program, a new partnership designed to help give brilliant scientists the media chops and savvy they need to better share their work with the public at large.

The Social Innovation Fellows program is in its third year, and is distinguished by the seriousness of its curricular program. For a full week before the larger conference begins, the selected entrepreneurs live in Camden and receive basically nonstop training, mentorship and support from designers, public speaking experts, social impact measurement folks, and more. The program has included social ventures like Global Citizen Year, Ushahidi, FrontlineSMS, and Samasource.

In many ways, the program demonstrates why having a "social entrepreneurship" field is so valuable. The projects represent an extremely diverse set of problems and approaches to change, but benefit from a curriculum that is overarching and reflects the needs of early stage socially focused ventures.

Yet at the same time, what happens after the Fellows program ends shows why the social entrepreneurship field shouldn't shirk it's overlap and potentials to integrate with the larger fields of business and science. Throughout the four days of he Maine conference, the Fellows give five minute presentations to the entire audience which end up being some of the best content of the event. This sparks conversations and partnerships with senior execs at well established companies that simply wouldn't come from an event purely focused on social entrepreneurship.

The lesson, I think, is that the field is young, but perhaps at the exciting moment where its beginning to have enough of sense of itself that it can interact with the larger fields that drive business and society, not with fear of assimilation but of excitement of mutual influence.

Photos: whiteafrican

I went to Opportunity Collaboration skeptical. Why was a conference on poverty alleviation being held at a beach resort in Mexico?

I left Opportunity Collaboration on Tuesday morning in awe of what the conference had accomplished. It was a rare masterpiece of an ‘unconference’, organized by Jonathan Lewis of MicroCredit Enterprises, and put on by COO Topher Wilkins with the help of quite a strong team of volunteers.

While I would rather have been less separated from the local communities of Ixtapa and Zihuatanejo, Mexico, I must admit the setting did serve the purpose of allowing the 300 attendees to connect deeply in a relaxed environment. Further, the conference with the help of I-DEV International did make an effort to connect to local Ixtapa area social entrepreneurs by hosting a work session to create a debt fund to support their growth.

The attendees, called “delegates”, were a mix of entrepreneurs, social entrepreneurs, investors, foundation directors, and non-profit directors. The conference also welcomed fifty Cordes Fellows which greatly added to the age and geographic diversity of the crowd.

The conference ran from Friday night through Tuesday night. I left Tuesday morning to get back to iContact as we have a very big week getting ready to move 235 team members this Friday to our new offices in Morrisville.

The schedule for each day looked something like:

• 8am – Swim in Pacific/Breakfast
• 9am – Colloquium for the Common Good (Discussion on a Reading in a Group of 25)
• 11am – Open (we used it to convene a group of millennial social entrepreneurs each day)
• 12pm – Lunch, with breakout groups called cluster forks
• 1:30pm – Wellness time - Soccer, kayaking, volleyball, sailing, archery
• 3pm – Collaboration Challenge (topical discussions)
• 5:30pm – Open for 1-1 meetings
• 6:30pm – Dinner, with breakout groups called cluster forks
• 8:30pm – Companies and Causes - 60 Second Pitch Session
• 10:00pm – Networking on the Deck

There were no panels and no keynotes. This led to people having the time to connect in deep conversations. It was one of the more enjoyable long weekends I can remember in my 26 years of life. Having the opportunity to engage deeply with some of the most innovative practitioners in the field of poverty alleviation and social entrepreneurship was immensely inspiring and beneficial.

Being laser-focused on getting iContact to an IPO in the next couple years and now having a great staff who can attend our 25 or so company trade shows each year, I've scaled back the number of conferences I attend in the past couple years. I tend to limit it to Summit Series, the Skoll World Forum, Renaissance Weekend, and a couple investment bank or analyst conferences per year. I will now add Opportunity Collaboration to the select annual list.

Why Did I Choose to Come?

OppColl was talked about heavily when I was at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford in April and came recommended to me by people whose opinion I trust--Nathaniel Whittemore of Assetmap, Kim Scheinberg of Presumed Abundance, Jonny Dorsey of Global Health Corps, Mike Del Ponte of SparkSeed and Ben Abram of Westly Group. And so I signed up, not really knowing what would come of it.

My interest in being at OppColl was four-fold.

• Vacation & Strategic Reflection: After working non-stop since February on our $40M Series B fundraise at iContact it was good to take three days off for a mini-vacation. Any time I can get out of my normal environment I find I can think more clearly about our strategy and get a big picture perspective. It turned out to be quite a valuable experience just from an iContact perspective, as there were a number of deep discussions on leadership I gained from and I wonderfully ran into at least ten of our customers who I always love connecting with about what they think about our company and product and what their additional needs are.
• A Passion for Ending Extreme Poverty: A large part of my interest in attending goes back to a lifelong passion I have of wanting to be part of a generational movement to end extreme poverty in our lifetimes and learn all I can about the topic. In a world with so much, it just does not make sense that 2.5 billion people live on under $2 per day and 22,000 children five or younger die every day in the developing world—most needlessly from preventable disease and starvation. I think I can make the biggest difference in extreme poverty in the mid-term via investing and private-sector job creation, but I'm very aware that it requires all three sectors (government, business, and civil sector) to work together. To actually create sustainable economic development the trifecta of transparent, non-corrupt, responsible, and well-run government, civil sector (NGOs/NPOs), and businesses must exist. OppColl does a great job of bringing together folks from all three sectors to collaborate.
• Nourish International: The non-profit organization for which I serve as Board Chairman, Nourish International, is at an important point in its history. It is transitioning from a completely donor-reliant model to a more sustainable model that includes a portion of its revenue from earned income. I came to connect to other non-profit directors and board members that have successfully created substantial earned income models for their organizations.
• Humanity Fund: I launched a small personal investment fund called the Humanity Fund in January. Going to OppColl was perhaps the easiest way to connect directly with the leaders of the microequity field. Through the Humanity Fund we invest $10k to $100k at a time in socially responsible high-growth for-profit businesses in Africa, Latin America, and the USA. This is a small effort for now in which I want to dip my toes into the water and make a couple investments per year as a way of gaining some learning lessons, getting exposure to high-growth businesses in “frontier markets” and investing in creating jobs in high-growth socially responsible businesses that are growing quickly. My hope over time is to show that it is very possible with the right structure, even with the challenges of transaction costs, trust, and liquidity, to achieve above-market returns by investing in microequity and investing in the missing-middle of SME financing in which growth capital simply is not presently available.

The People

Of the 300 delegates, the folks I spent the most time with at the conference were:

• Ben Abrams, Westly Group and FACE AIDS Board Member
• Jonny Dorsey, Global Health Corp
• Mike Del Ponte, Sparkseed
• Michael Wenger, OpenAction
• Saul Garlick, ThinkImpact
• Salif and Mohammed Niang, Malo Traders
• Abby Falik, Global Citizen Year
• Elizabeth Dearborn Davis, Akilah Institute for Women Rwanda
• Leticia Jauregui Casanueva, CREA
• Katie Drasser, UCSF Global Health Group
• Wiclif Odongo, Kito International
• TJ Cook, High Def Web Solutions
• Mia Divecha - Stanford Talisman
• Amity Weiss, Rwanda Nziza
• Marina Kim, Ashoka
• Mark Hanis, Genocide Intervention Network
• Asher Hasan, Naya Jeevan
• Chet Tchozewski, Global GreenGrants Fund

I already have a sense a number of these will turn into lifelong friendships.

I also connected with some key people in the emerging and fascinating field of microequity and impact investing:

• Brian Milder, Root Capital
• Lewis Hower, Unitus Equity Fund
• Harold Rosen, Grassroots Business Fund
• Gerhard Pries, Sarona Asset Management
• Keely Stevenson, Bamboo Finance
• Bob Freling, Solar Electric Light Fund
• Diane Calvey, Village Enterprise Fund
• Jan Pearcy, ShoreBank
• Bob Patillo, GrayGhost Ventures
• Ron Boehm, Boehm-Gladen Foundation

I was also particularly impressed by the economic potential (in addition to the social impact) of ventures of:

• Wello Water Wheel
• Dream & Achieve - Afghan Reality TV Show
• OpenAction

The Colloquium for the Common Good

The morning "Colloquium for the Common Good" offered an opportunity to connect deeply with a group 25-30 randomly selected delegates through two hours of discussion on a set of readings related to poverty alleviation (though I must admit I still struggle to understand why we were asked to read Antigone for day two). Our colloquium group was moderated by the well-known photographer Paola Gianturco. On the Saturday night a group of the millennial generation social entrepreneurs decided to have an ad hoc "indigenous community cultural immersion exercise" and went dancing in Ixtapa for a few hours so I regrettably missed out on the Sunday morning discussion of Antigone.

The readings for the Colloquium included:

• A Letter from Birmingham Jail by Martin Luther King, Jr.
• The Brothers Grimm, “The Wonderful Musician” (story)
• Antigone (play)
• Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (essay selection)
• Frantz Fanon, “On Violence in the International Context”, from The Wretched of the Earth (essay)
• Hernando de Soto, “By Way of Conclusion,” from The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (chapter from study)
• H.D. Thoreau, “Economy,” selections from Walden (essay)

The Millennial Social Entrepreneurs

We used the 11am hour two of the days to convene a group of younger entrepreneurs and social entrepreneurs to mind-map out on a whiteboard what we are currently doing to be part of ending extreme poverty. Then we shared our plans for scaling our impact over the next four decades and being part of the global movement to actually end extreme poverty by 2050. This was perhaps the hour of discussion I most looked forward to each day. Being able to map out the role I hope to play and gain feedback and go deep with Saul Garlick of ThinkImpact, Jonny Dorsey of Global Health Corps, Mark Hanis of the Genocide Intervention Network, Ben Abrams of Westly Group, Asher Hasan of Naya Jeevan, Leticia Casanueva of CREA, Amity Weiss of Rwanda Nziza, Mohamed Ali Niang of Malo Traders, and Elizabeth Dearborn Davis of Akilah Institute was intriguing and energizing.

Lunch & Wellness Time

Lunch provided ample opportunity to join a breakout "clusterfork" or have 1-1 meetings with other delegates. Example Cluster Fork topics included:

• Do Gooders With Spreadsheets
• Building Wealth and Assets Across Borders
• Money and Power for the World's Poorest Women Through Savings
• Impact Investors: Get More Deal Flow
• Preparing the Next Gen Global Leaders

After lunch we had time to relax or exercise. Having 90 minutes built in each day for "wellness" was unique and much appreciated for a conference. I kayaked, played soccer, swam, and even trapezed during this time.

Collaboration Challenges

The 3pm sessions convened groups of 30-40 in a chair-circle format to discuss a particular topic. My favorite "Collaboration Challenge" was the Millennial Social Entrepreneur themed session on Monday, particularly when we split off into a group to discuss for-profit social entrepreneurship and how to use the great power of markets and investment capital to increase social impact.

Some folks in the room thought that by definition you couldn't be a social entrepreneur if you ran a for-profit business. No consensus from the group emerged, but I along with others made every effort to make the point that the entrepreneur who runs a socially responsible enterprise, regardless of entity structure, is a social entrepreneur. Personally, I define a social entrepreneur as a "problem solver who takes action." To me, there are for-profit social entrepreneurs and non-profit social entrepreneurs and in some cases you can actually make a larger social impact by choosing to organize as a for-profit and be able to access capital and talent markets more effectively.

• Example topics for Collaboration Challenges included:
• Profits and Pitfalls in Social Investing
• Fattening Up the Food Supply
• Jobs at the Base of the Pyramid
• Poverty and Pollution: The Poisonous Paid
• Conscience of a Capitalist

Companies & Causes

Finally, each night after dinner was capped off by "Companies and Causes" a 60-second pitch session run by R. Paul Herman, author of HIP Investor. Perhaps 40 of the attendees pitched each night.

These pitches were generally good, with the sole exception of the unfortunate rule that if you combined into a larger group you would get as much as 3 minutes each instead of 1 minute. This caused the room to lose energy and the hour long pitch session to go 90-100 minutes, beyond the interest of most attendees who ended up hanging out instead in the adjacent bar. Overall, "Companies and Causes" was a great new addition to the conference, however I'd recommend keeping every pitch to 60-75 seconds next year. Less truly can be more.

Each night seemed to end with a spontaneous group of 20 and 30-somethings swimming in the Pacific.

So Should You Go to OppColl Next Year?

And so, if you're working in the field of social entrepreneurship broadly defined, are interested in meeting the CEOs of entrepreneurial ventures that have a huge potential for both financial and social return, care deeply about humanity, or care deeply about actually ending extreme poverty in our lifetimes, Opportunity Collaboration is probably the best conference to come to for the deep relationships it affords. It is not the best conference for content or big-name speakers--the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship is much better for that--but it is the best conference I've been to for facilitating the creation of deep, meaningful, beneficial relationships that can help both parties make an increased positive impact in the world. The conference is not inexpensive, so if funding is an issue be sure to apply early for a 2011 Cordes Fellowship.

Hope to see you there in 2011!

Were you there? What were your experiences? Do you wish you were? Is it justifiable to have an expensive conference on poverty alleviation at a resort if it brings great people together who in fact due to the connections they make are able to more effectively scale their social impact and more quickly end extreme poverty? We'd love your comments.

Photo credit: Jake Putnam

I try not to consume much, but when I do, I like to buy products that make me feel morally superior. Chances are, you do too. Right? My point is not that we're better than everyone else and therefore have the right to be smug (even if we do); my point is that there is an obvious niche market for consumers who pay close attention to where their goods come from and where they can go when they're done with them. But do these companies have--either an externally imposed or internally genuine--moral obligation to the greater good?

Mark Dwight, Founder and CEO of Rickshaw Bagworks says yes. He left his last company when he told the Board that they had a moral imperative to stop using PVC. They disagreed. So he started a competing company that doesn't compromise on that value and leads by example in many other ways such as manufacturing quality products in the USA. They meet their bottom line through innovation and embrace their-self imposed limitations as part of their business culture. I recently met Dwight and other environmental leaders at the Opportunity Green Conference and Dwight's comments were a springboard for others in the field.

If there is a moral obligation to innovate, is there also a moral obligation to be philanthropic? Rick Ridgeway of Patagonia used similar language as Dwight: "We have a moral obligation to do our penance as a company...business is harmful to the environment; we are morally obligated to mitigate that harm." As a member of 1% for the Planet, Patagonia has donated over $40M to environmental nonprofits and has become an icon among sustainable companies.

The next question: is it more important to be sustainably innovative or philanthropic? In 1993, New Belgium Brewing Company was giving away$1 for every barrel of beer sold. They asked themselves, as Jennifer Orgolini recalls, "Should we give that much? Should we keep more for greening our own operations?" The company decided that their dollars could be effectively used in both ways. Some environmental progress is better done by nonprofits and the world needs both innovative companies and funding for grassroots environmental efforts.

It's an important distinction that companies do need to be both leading by example and giving to organizations that can do other things better than they can. A coal mine giving away money to a land trust is different than a sustainably-minded company supporting causes that extend their values. Of course, it is in these company's best interests to support environmental nonprofits: Patagonia's customers won't have anywhere to use their gear if their favorite mountain trail becomes a housing subdivision and New Belgium acknowledges that "no fresh water means no great beer." There's nothing wrong with a symbiotic relationship.

The fact that environmentalists are using words like "penance" and "moral" is fascinating. I emerged from an evangelical Christian background. In that culture, the prevailing view--not held by everyone of course--is basically that God created the Earth and then created humans to dominate it; we're going to die and go to heaven so why should we care what happens on this planet after that? That's God's problem to save us from. I don't like that the Religious Right has commandeered certain words and concepts. I like being reminded that morals are not just about personal choices like not having sex before marriage; they are about choices to do the right thing for the greater good. (And on a sarcastic note, it gives me a broader platform from which my smugness can emanate.)

Photo Credit: Kerri Feazell

I recently spent two days at the Opportunity Green Conference in LA where I was immersed in conversations about sustainable business. One panel, Accelerating Green Product Innovation, provided interesting examples of innovation in businesses from entrepreneurs in various stages: from pre-launch (Replenish), to firmly-footed (Rickshaw Bagworks) to household name (Coca-Cola).

Innovation Principle #1: Limitation Inspires Innovation
Jason Foster, founder and CEO of Replenish had a crazy idea: "Let's build products that are designed for re-use." In a consumer society where items are purposely manufactured for a short life-span, this is an innovation. (Side note, if you haven't seen The Story of Stuff, it's well-worth 20 minutes of your time.) Foster's innovative design for cleaning products reduces plastic by 90% and costs 50% less than competitors. They knew they could reach that goal but in designing their product, they encountered some challenges to their ideals. Making their product in PET (easily recycled material), proved a challenge within the existing manufacturing infrastructure. But they stuck to their principles and in the end, Foster was grateful for the limited options that gave some direction to their design--the limitations actually inspired greater innovation.

Innovation Principle #2: Good Ideas Spread
Panelist Mark Dwight, Founder and CEO of Rickshaw Bagworks, started the company with old-fashioned values that made the now-moguls what they are decades ago: pay attention to form, function, and footprint. As a small business, Rickshaw's innovations have even attracted mega companies to adopt some of their practices. For example, Rickshaw's practice of shipping their products to customers in bags that can be re-used for returns if needed caught the attention of ebay. It's encouraging to see larger companies asking start-ups how to innovate and to see start-ups sharing those ideas for the greater good.

Innovation Principle #3: Maybe Recycling is Better than Re-Creation
When big companies do take the lead with innovation, their investment in research can have immense impact. Panelist Gopal Kishnan, Senior Director of Global Marketing Innovation and New Categories for The Coca-Cola Company talked about Coke's new PlantBottle. It's made with up to 30% plant-based material (sugar cane) and can be recycled just like any PET material.  I would like to see more research on this, but Gopal explained that they created the PlantBottle as a material that can be recycled rather than composted because the energy required to create a new bottle is less than is required to recycle the bottle in to new material. I want to see a PlantBottle that could go either way but in the meantime, this is challenging me to rethink some of my assumptions.

The idealist in me was reminded of an important underlying idea key to innovation. During the Q and A, a participant asked, “Do you wait until the design is perfect?” and Dwight answered, “Iteration is the key to innovation, and perfection is the enemy of progress. Sustainability is a journey. Don’t wait for perfection. There is no 'perfect' product.”

Photo credit: opportunitygreen

I recently spent two days at the Opportunity Green Conference in LA where I was immersed in conversations about sustainable business. One panel, Accelerating Green Product Innovation, provided interesting examples of innovation in businesses from entrepreneurs in various stages: from pre-launch (Replenish), to firmly-footed (Rickshaw Bagworks) to household name (Coca-Cola).

Innovation Principle #1: Limitation Inspires Innovation
Jason Foster, founder and CEO of Replenish had a crazy idea: "Let's build products that are designed for re-use." In a consumer society where items are purposely manufactured for a short life-span, this is an innovation. (Side note, if you haven't seen The Story of Stuff, it's well-worth 20 minutes of your time.) Foster's innovative design for cleaning products reduces plastic by 90% and costs 50% less than competitors. They knew they could reach that goal but in designing their product, they encountered some challenges to their ideals. Making their product in PET (easily recycled material), proved a challenge within the existing manufacturing infrastructure. But they stuck to their principles and in the end, Foster was grateful for the limited options that gave some direction to their design--the limitations actually inspired greater innovation.

Innovation Principle #2: Good Ideas Spread
Panelist Mark Dwight, Founder and CEO of Rickshaw Bagworks, started the company with old-fashioned values that made the now-moguls what they are decades ago: pay attention to form, function, and footprint. As a small business, Rickshaw's innovations have even attracted mega companies to adopt some of their practices. For example, Rickshaw's practice of shipping their products to customers in bags that can be re-used for returns if needed caught the attention of ebay. It's encouraging to see larger companies asking start-ups how to innovate and to see start-ups sharing those ideas for the greater good.

Innovation Principle #3: Maybe Recycling is Better than Re-Creation
When big companies do take the lead with innovation, their investment in research can have immense impact. Panelist Gopal Kishnan, Senior Director of Global Marketing Innovation and New Categories for The Coca-Cola Company talked about Coke's new PlantBottle. It's made with up to 30% plant-based material (sugar cane) and can be recycled just like any PET material.  I would like to see more research on this, but Gopal explained that they created the PlantBottle as a material that can be recycled rather than composted because the energy required to create a new bottle is less than is required to recycle the bottle in to new material. I want to see a PlantBottle that could go either way but in the meantime, this is challenging me to rethink some of my assumptions.

The idealist in me was reminded of an important underlying idea key to innovation. During the Q and A, a participant asked, “Do you wait until the design is perfect?” and Dwight answered, “Iteration is the key to innovation, and perfection is the enemy of progress. Sustainability is a journey. Don’t wait for perfection. There is no 'perfect' product.”

Photo credit: opportunitygreen