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Housing Series: From the Field, Reflections From Two Dow Corning Leaders on Building a BoP Market
Dow Corning’s Citizen Service Corps sends employees around the world to see, hear and think about what new markets need, and come back ready to translate those insights into innovations and new products. The posts below are excerpts from two employees who worked on Housing for All in India as their volunteer experience.
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Aligning Money with Values
At this month’s Columbia Social Enterprise Conference panel on Impact Investors Spreading Social Innovation, Charly and Lisa Kleissner of KL Felicitas Foundation shared their journey in merging personal values with wealth management. The Kleissners immediately radiated the boldness and entrepreneurial charisma of Silicon Valley.
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- impact investing
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Housing Series: Why Dow Corning Sends Employees to Serve BoP Projects around the World
What would happen if major global companies sent their employees to work with people in emerging economies for weeks at a time to get to know their cultures, needs and daily patterns of life? Not as "poverty tourism," but rather part of a strategy to see all that is happening and and then to think how that translates to product innovations.
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Seven Billion: The Real Population Scare Is Not What You Think
The Earth’s resources that underpin our modern lifestyles are deteriorating. This is not to suggest that hard-earned middle class lifestyles must be curbed or that Africans and Asians should be denied the chance to own laptops and iPods. Far from it. Rather, as the middle class grows, business needs to find ways to shrink natural resource use.
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- Environment, Health Care
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- nutrition
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Markets of the Poor: Limits and Opportunities
Marketing socially useful products to the poor offers only limited business opportunities. Still, there are some profitable opportunities and we need creative entrepreneurs to design the right business models to serve the poor. To profitably serve the poor, firms need to make the cost-quality trade-off to make the products affordable by the poor.
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- Impact Assessment
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Housing Series: Building a Strong Foundation, When Earthquakes Hurricanes Hit Affordable Housing
"Earthquakes don’t kill people, poorly built buildings do," says Elizabeth Hausler, an engineer who turned her passion and know-how for building into an international non-profit social enterprise. Creating strategies and best practices to build safe and affordable housing became her life’s work and sparked her to found Build Change.
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- Social Enterprise
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NextThought Monday: Wisdom From on High
Our PopTech Social Innovation Fellows Boot Camp takes place on top a mountain, and the symbolism is not lost on any of us. It’s an intense five days of shared ascent for fellows and faculty alike. The goal of this conversation is to give the new entrepreneurs the benefit of what these fellows already learned about managing and launching a startup.
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- Technology
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- innovation
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From the Roundtable: Reflections on Improving Microfinance
Citi Foundation recently hosted an interesting day-long roundtable that focused on the Center for Financial Inclusion’s (CFI) report on "Opportunities and Obstacles to Financial Inclusion." It’s an important report because it raises significant issues for the sector. The discussion focused on how to protect and educate legitimate borrowers.
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