Articles by Cheryl Heller
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Monday
January 16
2017Measuring the Impact of Social Design
A group of talented people will come together at the Measured Summit in New York City on Jan. 24 to discuss protocols for measuring the impact of social design in an effort to understand it better, evaluate where it works and why, attract and prepare the next practitioners to take it further, and scale those things about it that have earned attention and hope.
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- Impact Assessment
- Tags
- product design
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Thursday
November 21
2013If You Can Only Read One Book On Social Innovation … : Ken Banks has made us that book
In “The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator” the ten stories Ken Banks has compiled create a profile of a new kind of leader who, unlike most in the news today have not competed for the place and title. Instead, what these innovators have in common is the recognition of other’s pain and injustice that they weren’t willing to live with – and despite practical considerations, couldn’t ignore.
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- Impact Assessment
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Monday
November 5
2012NexThought Monday: Unlocking Intrapreneurship with Language
Intrepreneurship, innovation and corporate social responsibility (along with all their nuanced pseudonyms) are labels for activities and values that are used in order to separate them from business as usual. Of course, the cost of that to business is high, since they have become something separate from the normal life of a corporation, and they shouldn’t.
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- Education
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Friday
September 14
2012Forget Poverty – Let’s Talk About Business: ‘Generalist’ Paul Polak offers specifics for social entrepreneurs
When you talk to Paul Polak it takes about 15 seconds for him to dive into the pragmatic details of his six or so latest business ventures. It’s easy at first to be overwhelmed with detail, but if you stay with it, you realize that he has taken practicality and common sense to a blazing edge. In a very different context, it’s what I imagine it must have been like to talk to Sam Walton in the early days of Wal-Mart.
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- Education
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Guest Articles
Monday
July 2
2012NextThought 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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Wednesday
May 30
2012Bottoms Up: A Thought Experiment on Designing for Social Impact
I have been a participant in several student-led communities lately that demonstrated some of the social principles of biomomicry: The Social Enterprise Boot Camp (a collaboration between Columbia, NYU and SVA Design for Social Innovation), GES (Global Engagement Summit at Northwestern) and the NYC Creative Interns. While they still may not have cracked the code for how we will evolve to become a sustainable species, they provide enough hope to keep us all working at it.
- Categories
- Education, Impact Assessment
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Sunday
April 22
2012Weekly Wrap: On Earth Day, Poverty, in All its Shapes and Sizes
Poverty is everywhere. The state of being impoverished, poverty-stricken, limited or depleted is not exclusive to the bottom of the pyramid, and the bottom of the pyramid is no longer exclusive to the countries we call developing. Poverty is also not exclusive to our species.
- Categories
- Environment
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Monday
March 26
2012NexThought Monday: Poverty, Identity and Design
I have been, in a short stretch of time, to Buffalo, Nairobi, Mexico City; and Detroit. Each of these cities has its own colorful, distinct identity, and shares in common (but not exclusivity) a struggle with deeply-rooted poverty. While it’s difficult not to compare the causes and commonalities of poverty in these vastly different places, it’s more useful, perhaps, to explore the role that identity might play in solving it.
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- Uncategorized