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When Awards and Idealism Aren’t Enough: My social enterprise earned a ton of public acclaim – but it was missing something even more important
In her early 20s, Leticia Gasca launched a social enterprise to help some of Mexico’s poorest people. Powered by idealism and some promising early results, the company garnered both national and international acclaim. But behind the scenes, it was struggling with the harsh realities of doing business. Gasca shares the story in this frank post, the first in our series with F*ckUp Nights on failure in social enterprise.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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Enter Unreasonable Labs: Trial and error on a global scale
Teju Ravilochan, CEO of the Unreasonable Institute says the social enterprise organization needs "co-conspirators" to help them forge a new system of trial and error. They’re looking for 10 teams from 10 locations around the world to run 10 Unreasonable Labs, five-day versions of Unreasonable Institute with 10 ventures each.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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Announcing NextBillion’s Latest E-book (and the first from NextBillion Financial Innovation): A compilation of posts and videos from our Impact Investing Insights series
In the spring of 2014, NextBillion Financial Innovation videotaped interviews with 11 top investors, academics and advocates working in impact investing. We published the Q&As in a series called Impact Investing Insights. We have compiled the posts and videos into this e-book, which covers a broad cross-section of the topics and trends that drive the sector today.
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- Investing, Social Enterprise
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Curbing the “Impact Impostors”: The growing movement toward transparency in impact investing
Impact investing’s rising popularity has spawned some unfortunate side effects. For instance, as demand for a social component has grown among investors, so have efforts to brand standard equity investments with the impact label – even when their actual impact is negligible. In the final post of his series, Bill Burckart details the efforts of policy makers, regulators and investors to address this issue.
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- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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5 Success Factors for Technology Distribution and Adoption in the Last Mile
How can innovative technologies be distributed and adopted at scale in the last mile? This is a key question driving social enterprises and nonprofits aiming to leverage the power of innovative products designed for the poor. Kopernik, a nonprofit headquartered in Indonesia, has consolidated its observations into five key factors – factors that Project Manager Tomohiro Hamakwa hopes will be useful for other enterprises hoping to make market inroads.
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- Energy, Social Enterprise
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Welcoming Cuba as an Emerging Market, ‘Lab’ for Social Enterprise
Insomuch as the Cuban people are underserved by their government on a host of vital services – from transportation to medical devices to Internet connectivity to agricultural development – the opportunities for social enterprises are enormous. Several organizations have been laying the groundwork for a new, pro-business relationship with Cuba’s government and its people.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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Twitter Top Ten – 12/14/14: Our favorite tweets of the week
As we move one step closer to the end of the year, we’ve got a full slate of interesting tweets from the past week. They include some encouraging investments and new partnerships, important new research, and an intriguing reply from Safaricom to a recent NextBillion post. As always, if you see anything you like, be sure to retweet it.
- Categories
- Health Care, Social Enterprise
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October’s Most Viewed, Most Shared Posts on NB
The most popular and most shared articles for October focus on hybrid profit/nonprofit approaches to social enterprise, the need for smarter microfinance approaches and the re-issue of a database tracking more than $15 billion in impact fund assets.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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