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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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Focusing on a Virtuous Circle Around Business Strategy and Impact Assessment
As a first-timer at the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) Metrics Conference in Washington D.C. last month, I was surprised to see a packed room on the first morning of the conference. After all, this was a conference about a very niche topic – the techniques used to measure social and environmental impact within the embryonic industry of impact investing. Impact investing is a broad term that describes profit-seeking investments that also generate positive social and/or environmental impact.
- Categories
- Impact Assessment, Social Enterprise
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Part III: Getting the Most Out of Your Board
If designed and managed correctly, a corporate governance board,strengthens, not weakens, the leadership of a social enterprise and helps to ensure the success of the social enterprise.
In last week’s post, we at the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship discussed the first step: creating the right governance board for your social enterprise. The focus of this post is on managing the board once it is created.- Categories
- Social Enterprise, Uncategorized
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Weekly Roundup: Planting the SEED
Social enterprises face a number of extreme challenges that are difficult to surmount in the first few years, at the center of which is the challenge of creating viable, scalable business models around their social innovations. That’s why Villgro, a social enterprise incubator in Chennai, India, has created an intensive training program geared to speed up the business model refinement process for entrepreneurs who have not yet raised external investment, with the aim of helping them to raise their first rounds of funding.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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Creating the Right Board for Your Social Enterprise
While for-profit corporations often focus on accountability towards their shareholders, social enterprises are often torn between interests of their target group and interest of their funders. Research by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship revealed some interesting findings on this issue.
- Categories
- Education, Social Enterprise
- Tags
- governance
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VOZ: From Chile, Bringing ‘Triple E’ Fashion and Connecting BoP Artisans With Luxury Markets
I am grateful that this young product designer, who graduated from Stanford, trained in innovation, cultural anthropology and art, has chosen the Araucanía Region of Chile to launch VOZ (Voice), a start-up that seeks to promote fair trade in luxury ethnic fashion, based on collaborative, environmentally-friendly design and production methods.
- Categories
- Social Enterprise
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Entering NB’s Case Competition? Join the WDI Webinar June 21 for Tips and Tools to Build the Perfect Case Study
The hour-long webinar on June 21, which will start with a brief overview of case method teaching and learning, followed by guidelines for the first steps of writing a case study. Specifically, participants will learn how to develop solid, measureable teaching objectives, choose a case topic, determine an organization or company to feature, gather credible background information, and create a case outline.
- Categories
- Education, Social Enterprise
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Introducing the 2013 NextBillion Case Writing Competition Judges
Winning cases for the NextBillion Case Writing Competition will be published and likely adopted by numerous university professors instructing the next generation of business leaders. So we’re happy to have a team of judges with seriously strong CVs and a depth of experience in the worlds of academia, consulting, development, and business.
- Categories
- Education, Social Enterprise
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