NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Thursday, September 12, 2013

We’ve all been to an endless procession of conferences where shiny, successful people share their triumphs and “best practices” to rounds of applause. There’s plenty of such puffery in the private sector, but if anything, the pressure to please donors and stakeholders by making it seem like everything’s going great is even higher in the social entrepreneurship space–even when it’s not.

FAILFaire is designed as a corrective to all that feel-good blather. Started several years ago in New York City by MobileActive, the initial intent was to share projects in the field of “ICT4D” (information technology for the developing world) that just didn’t work, along with the reasons why.

Here are their top five lessons shared. They can apply not only to social enterprise, but to all enterprises: