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Perspective: Become Local Change Makers Through Social Entrepreneurship
Ikigai is a Japanese concept meaning ‘a reason for being’, which is roughly translated to ‘thing that you live for’ in English. Each individual’s Ikigai is personal and specific to their lives, values and beliefs. A social entrepreneur’s Ikigai is to bring systems change and/or mindset change with innovative solutions to society’s most pressing social, cultural, and environmental challenges. From deep within, he/she is committed to the good of all. They are ambitious and persistent — tackling major issues and offering new ideas for systems-level change. Moreover, social entrepreneurs are not trying to ‘capture a market’. They make their ideas as simple and as safe as possible so that people in thousands of different communities will seize the idea and become local change makers.
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- Entrepreneurship
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Social Entrepreneurs Pitch For Change at Ashoka SEAChange Even
In the audience at the Ashoka Sea Change Event, more than 140 impact investors, diverse supporting organisations, and leaders in the African ecosystem together at Bowmans in Sandton, South Africa.
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- Entrepreneurship
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Do You Speak Social Finance? Helping Entrepreneurs and Impact Investors Overcome their Language Barrier
Social entrepreneurs and impact investors often speak different languages: Entrepreneurs are fluent in the dimension of impact, while investors are more focused on the bottom line. A new education platform called the Social Finance Academy strives to bridge this gap via free, online learning packages that enable investors and entrepreneurs to reach common ground. Christina Moehrle and Maxime Cheng of Roots of Impact explore the platform's early success and potential impact.
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- Entrepreneurship, Investing
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Most Influential Post Nominee: New Paradigm for Leadership – Everyone Leads
In today's complex, interconnected world, operating under the dominant leadership paradigm in society – one in which few lead and everyone else follows – is proving ineffective. In this article, the most popular post on NB in May, Ashoka identifies ways in which leading social entrepreneurs are seeing things differently, enabling them to envision new possibilities. It's in the running for the Most Influential Post of 2016.
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- Education, Entrepreneurship
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NexThought Monday: Pay for Success … With an Important Twist
Did you ever wonder how to adapt the pay-for-success model to market-based social enterprises and inclusive businesses? How to catalyze and secure private investments that allow scaling? And how to make sure that each party involved has an incentive to outperform on impact? Roots of Impact believes they've found an answer to these questions.
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- Investing
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The Imperative of Change – An Interview with Bill Drayton
"All of us are living at an extraordinary time, when the world is making the final move away from being organized around repetition, to being organized around change." That's the view of social enterprise pioneer Bill Drayton, founder and CEO of Ashoka. He describes this vision and its vast implications in this video interview, recorded at the SOCAP15 conference.
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- Entrepreneurship, NextBillion Originals
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Seeing Solutions Instead of Problems: What happens when 16 Changemakers come together to innovate? They hope to find out Sept. 25–27
Being part of a network not only gives social entrepreneurs visibility and recognition for their innovative work, it also puts them in contact with entrepreneurs from all over the world who, like them, are implementing projects that positively impact communities. That’s the idea behind the Ashoka Globalizer Summit on Economic Inclusion taking place in Buenos Aires, Sept. 25–27.
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- Education, Entrepreneurship, Health Care
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Six Years, Many Lessons: Scaling Impact from the Ashoka Globalizer Program
Why don’t great ideas that are useful and working effectively to solve some of the most pressing social challenges “travel” as well as business ideas do? An organization doesn’t have more impact the bigger it becomes, in fact, it’s quite the opposite … and this became our mantra and our working hypothesis at the Ashoka Globalizer Program.
- Categories
- Entrepreneurship
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