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Students: Make the Most Out of the Recession
I’ve been chatting with a number of my students in Social Venture Creation about their commitment to their projects post class. To my delight, many are strongly considering moving forward to launch because of the state of the jobs market. And even better, they are recruiting their colleagues to join on!
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Finding the Efficient Frontier of Financial and Social Returns
One of the most heavily-attended panels at the Harvard Social Enterprise Conference this year was titled: Social Impact Investing: Putting Your Dollar to Work in the Developing World. Moderator Amit Bouri opened with a question for the audience: "How many believe that to increase social impact, financial investors must sacrifice financial returns?"
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Find Out What Works. Then [Find A Platform to] Spread It.
A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of meeting Toshi Nakamura, co-founder of Kopernik, an interesting venture that is addressing the challenge of technology dissemination at the base of the pyramid.
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Developing a Rigorous Methodology to Assess Impact
As more BoP ventures begin to think about measuring impact, many have questions around how to do so. This post explores some important issues to think through when developing a rigorous methodology to assess impact.
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Kenya Dispatch – M-PESA to the Rescue
Since its introduction in 2006, I have been obsessing over an innovative little cell phone service called M-PESA. Launched by Safaricom ? Vodafone?s subsidiary in East Africa ? the M-PESA service allows Safaricom customers to transfer phone credit wirelessly, through SMS.
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From the Classroom: Finnovations at Work
At business school, we hear a lot about financial innovations that spur economic growth in developing countries. On paper, these ideas sound incredible, infallible, and a developed, prosperous world is just around the corner. But in practice, which ideas are really working and can we really tell from the safe confines of a university?
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SME Banking: The Next Frontier in Low-Income Finance
SME Banking represents the next frontier in BoP finance in terms of its social impact and the sophistication required for profitably serving the poor. In this post and based on a recent IFC publication, the SME Banking Knowledge Guide, I explain how commercial banks are catering to SMEs by taking recourse to their competitive advantages.
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Indicorps Fellowships – Apply by March 1
Question: What do you get when you mix equal parts Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King and John F. Kennedy?Answer: The ideal Indicorps Fellow.
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