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NexThought Monday: European Impact Investing – Poised to Grow or Largely Irrelevant?
Last year, Ashoka’s Germany Director, Felix Oldenburg, took on – and took apart – impact investing as we currently know it, challenging it on a few specific points. Now, we share a telephonic debate between Oldenburg and Johannes Weber, founder of Social Venture Fund, the first pan-European social venture capital fund, who contests Oldenburg’s assumptions to push forward the dialogue on our much-discussed, much-anticipated new space of impact investing.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
- Tags
- impact investing
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NextThought Monday: Helping the BoP Design its Own Way Out of Poverty
Daniel Altman is an economist, writer and teacher with a deep commitment to international development. He’s had a revelation about the power of consumer products to create markets from the inside out, and he’s doing something about it.
Emerging Design Centers (EDCs) is a for-profit enterprise that puts cutting-edge design tools in the hands of the poor.- Categories
- Impact Assessment
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PopTech: On Failure, Jedi Knights and the Edge of Social Change
I recently sat down with Executive Director and Curator Andrew Zolli, and PopTech President Leetha Filderman for a candid conversation on a broad spectrum of topics, from impact investing to the importance of failure, to the pace of social innovation and how PopTech sees its role as an accelerant. While best known for its leave-your-head-spinning conferences, it appears that what’s actually popping at PopTech is a lot quieter, slower and more fundamental than may initially meet the eye.
- Categories
- Education, Impact Assessment
- Tags
- failure, incubators
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At the 2012 Clinton Global Initiative University: ‘Talent is Universal: Opportunity is Not’
Last weekend over 1,000 students from around the world gathered on the campus of the George Washington University in Washington, D.C. for the 2012 Clinton Global Initiative University. To get there, each of them had to make a commitment to action. From tracking cholera epidemics in Bangladesh, to reducing delinquency among disadvantaged young women in Arkansas through mentoring and coaching, to creating awareness about campus sustainability issues in Florida,
- Categories
- Education, Impact Assessment
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Best Ideas of 2011: The Reshaping of Capitalism
As much as I can and often do criticize the Occupy Wall Street movement for its lack of focus, direction, and tangible outcomes - there is something about it that makes me extremely hopeful. Capitalism is slowly undergoing a massive transformation, a call launched by Occupy, and answered by the Social Enterprise Movement.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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From Occupy Wall St. to Impact Investing, 2 Visions of Markets at Net Impact 2011
As the Occupy Wall Street protesters continued their encampment in Portland near the Net Impact 2011 venue last weekend, it became difficult to reconcile two visions of international markets. Still, speakers posited that concepts of global development and markets were merging fast, and offered the best solution to reducing economic inequality.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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What Global Development Needs to Make an iPhone? Start With Storytelling
Esther Duflo. Abhijit Bhanerjee. Dean Karlan. These are household names in global development thanks to their leadership for more evidence-based project design and implementation. Here’s another name: Marc Maxson, a consultant with GlobalGiving who helped create and implement its Storytelling Project, which goes beyond eliminating selection bias.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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NextThought Monday: New Modes of Mobility for the Poor
Disabilities perpetuate a poverty trap and push the poor further from access to education, employment and healthcare. Most policies, programs and entrepreneurial initiatives in India have focused on providing employment. Little attention has been paid to helping the disabled - in particular, the poor - become more mobile themselves.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Transportation
- Tags
- transportation
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