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Seen and Heard at SOCAP14, Day 1
“The brain is just about the same ... (but) the heart seems to be a lot bigger in social entrepreneurs,” said William Draper, famed Silicon Valley venture capitalist turned venture philanthropist. His comments helped kick off SOCAP14.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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A Shift in Focus: Impact investing needs to concentrate less on problems, more on solutions, says Burckart
Impact investing has generated plenty of discussion and some fairly unbridled enthusiasm - though earlier predictions of $1 trillion in new capital by 2020 now seem overly optimistic. Bill Burckart, managing director of Impact Economy North America, discusses the sector’s growth and challenges in this video interview, part 6 of our Impact Investing Insights series.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
- Tags
- impact investing
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NexThought Monday – The Affordable Housing Puzzle: Three pilot projects in India aim to assemble the pieces –customers, financing and scale
Can the low-cost or affordable housing segment business in fact be profitable, and more importantly, scalable? asks housing developer and researcher Dhaval Monani. He points to new pilot projects that show promise in delivering safe, very low-cost homes that come with a profit for developers.
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The Companies Act has Promise, but Will India Inc. Cash In?: Business value and social good can converge if companies shift focus from compliance to results
There is much excitement in India around the social Companies Act, which stipulates that 2 percent of corporations’ profits must be spent on CSR. But the surge in CSR spending stemming from the new law will only be successful if execution looks markedly different from how CSR and philanthropic money has been spent in the past, says Dalberg’s Gaurav Gupta.
- Categories
- Uncategorized
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It’s About Time, It’s Also About Culture: How do varying cultural perspectives about time and productivity impact social enterprises?
Andrea Trice is researching how “soft” factors such as mutual understanding and trust influence the success of a social enterprise. While it’s too early to draw conclusions, Trice notes that it’s difficult to overestimate the role of culture in shaping how each of us thinks and acts, and therefore how businesses succeed or fail.
- Categories
- Agriculture, Education, Social Enterprise
- Tags
- research
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Israeli Innovation Meets Rwandan Entrepreneurship: High-tech for Western markets is still the main focus of Israeli startups, but that’s slowly changing
Israel has the second-highest concentration of start-up companies after Silicon Valley, but most of this entrepreneurial energy has been focused on Western markets. This is slowly changing, with projects like kLab in Rwanda, writes Caylee Talpert, deputy director of the Pears Innovation for International Development Program at Tel Aviv University.
- Categories
- Technology, Telecommunications
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NexThought Monday – Creators, Not Just Consumers: Facebook and other global players are bringing transformative digital technology to the BoP – but will local economies benefit?
A budding tech industry can help transform emerging markets, says Chris Locke. But as global powerhouses like Facebook and Google focus on the BoP, will they build local jobs and economies, or act like digital extractive industries, mining personal data and using it to create value elsewhere?
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Technology, Telecommunications
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Innovations in Education: What CEI has learned in its first year, and what’s ahead
In its first year, the Center for Education Innovations has documented close to 500 programs serving the poor in more than 135 countries. Next up: Understanding more about what works, why and how.
- Categories
- Education, Impact Assessment
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