The Impact Economy

New White House Social Innovation Director Jonathan Greenblatt told people attending this year's annual PopTech conference in Maine today that the White House is preparing for the rise of an "impact economy" - a new approach to social problem-solving that involves impact investing and new hybrids of business and philanthropy to scale good.

Greenblatt, a co-founder of Ethos Water and former CEO of GOOD who began his new job last month, said his office is "looking to create a new infrastructure inside government" to support social innovation "that can involve technology but also seeks new thinking that will identify, then fund, solutions that are already working." Greenblatt said this effort "isn't angel capital for the social space. That is what philanthropy does. We are looking for solutions that already work, and to fund them commensurate to their impact."

Since its founding two years ago, Greenblatt said, the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation has expanded the Americorps program and is using competitions and prizes to help identify new, entrepreneurial solutions to social problems. It also has created the $200 million Social Innovation Fund to scale what works through dozens of community organizations already on the ground. Earlier this year, the Office also added a line item to the President's budget to create Social Impact Bonds, a new way to pay for public services. [The plan would use private, profit-motivated investment money to fund public services up front. The government would only pay if the services deliver as promised, and only out of government cost-savings. The idea: to avoid the waste of tax dollars on failed programs.]

But more is needed amid great challenges, Greenblatt said. "We remain in a very difficult set of economic and social circumstances, with a housing problem that has bedeviled the experts" and a national unemployment rate of 9.1 percent that gets worse in communities of color. "We also have companies that often don't abide by the letter or the spirit of the law" and "a political system where some of the actors remain committed not necessarily to governance, but to opposition in a way that I just don't think is constructive." The result, he said, is that the nonprofit sector is now often taking "the brunt of the blow." At a time when government has less resources, he said, more is being asked of nonprofit organizations. "We need them to deliver more in a moment when they actually have less," Greenblatt said.

A new and expanded definition of the social sector will help, he said. The nonprofit sector, he said, "isn't just a collection of soup kitchens" but a sector that "helps to cohere the whole population" with over $300 billion in aggregate wages. It represents 5 percent of the country's GDP and 11 percent of its work force. "Nonprofits are like small businesses," he added, with nearly all of them operating on budgets of $1 million or less. But there is something "even more profound afoot," Greenblatt added. "Business can be a force for change, too." When we look at businesses that have an explicit social dimension to their mission, he added, "the opportunity for the social sector is even larger. It is even more important," Greenblatt said. New start-up social enterprises, coupled with many large-scale corporations that are helping to create new models of shared value, working to service shareholders "but also thinking intelligently and in integrated ways about supporting their stakeholders" also are important players in the social sector. "Ensuring the health and vitality of the entire sector is critical," Greenblatt added, "and essential to our national health."

Greenblatt said the White House is preparing for two trends in social innovation -- first, the advent of an impact economy, which refers to changes in today's business community such as the emergence of impact-investing. "These are conventional capitalists who are identifying opportunities to invest in the social sector, to drive economic return and social good," Greenblatt said. He said the Monitor Institute has described this as a category that could be worth more than $100 billion by the end of the decade.

Second, Greenblatt said, he and the White House are also very focused on the idea of a civic engagement continuum. "The idea that you need to don a red jacket to serve seems important but we think there's a bigger opportunity at hand that is enabled by technology," Greenblatt said. He cited citizen advocacy efforts like Data Without Borders and Code for America as being important initiatives that "marry technology talent to need." And he cited Meetup and the crowdfunding platform, Kickstarter, as being "extraordinary" new ways ordinary people are convening to work for social change. "This is not 800 million people on Facebook who may or may never connect," Greenblatt said. "We at the White House are eager to help these phenomenon grow because we believe they represent the gears of a healthy society -- the foundation of a social sector that is vibrant."

Greenblatt concluded his remarks to the PopTech crowd by asking conferees for their help to "bring more financial capital into the field to scale the social sector" and to "boost the number of human capitalists" working in it. Said Greenblatt: "This work matters now more than ever."

-- Marcia Stepanek

[Photo of Jonathan Greenblatt addressing 2011 PopTech conference by Kris Krug for PopTech]

Cities Calling

There's a new social innovation initiative that just launched called Code for America. It's a big deal; it was founded to help American cities innovate around paralyzing budget cuts, old technology and rising taxes.

Starting this month, Code for America is recruiting the brightest minds of the Web 2.0 generation to transform city governments -- to re-wire them for transparency, citizen participation and action. "Our cities are in major crisis," says Founder Jen Pahlka, yet this is a time of major opportunity for social innovation in cities across the country. Some 60 percent of municipal employees, she says, are set to retire over the next five years. "What if, instead of cutting services or raising taxes, cities could leverage the power of the Web to become more efficient, transparent, and participatory?"

Pahlka says her project aims to do for city governments what Teach for America has been doing for America's public schools -- creating a body of knowledge and context for how institutions need to rebuild themselves for the Digital Age. The initiative also represents a big step for the accountability-in-government movement; freeing up more of the information stored in city databases for public use "will catalyze new forms of problem-solving and service," Pahlka says, "and there is a huge community of talented technologists and designers who want to help."

Pahlka and her team have chosen five cities for Code for America projects -- Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Boston, Boulder, and Seattle. Pahlka is now recruiting people to work on those projects. Five fellows will be chosen per city; each five-person team will attend a short training program in the San Francisco Bay area and then travel to their various host cities to learn about each cities' unique challenges. The fellows then will return to the Bay area to build solutions; top social innovators in government and technology will be brought in to support the fellows in their work "and help them create this new ecosystem of open cities across America," Pahlka says. "We're looking at each of these cities as a new tech start-up." The year-long program will provide each fellow with a $35,000 stipend and cover all travel costs.

Interested? The application deadline is August 15.

(Illustration by Giovanni Merino for istock.com)

The New Digital Divide

Call it the New Digital Divide. In the early days of the Web, social innovators predicted it would spawn a more open and democratic society. Today, though, that hope is being strongly challenged.

According to Eli Pariser, a cofounder and former Executive Director of MoveOn.org, data aggregators like Google have started using increasingly sophisticated filters to decide what information we consume online. Trouble is, these new levels of data-personalization, along with the growth of social networks that we use to self-aggregate, are threatening to hamper civic engagement. The filtering, Pariser told those attending this week's Personal Democracy Forum in Manhattan, is starting to keep us from being exposed to a surge of new information and ideas -- and chiefly, viewpoints that may differ from our own.

For example, Pariser says, Google now uses 57 different personalization filters to customize what we see on the Web, even if we aren't logged in. That makes it harder for us to see news and information that Google's algorithms suggest might bore us or upset us. And that's not all, says Pariser. Often, these "filter bubbles" keep information from us without our specific permission -- and worse, without our knowledge. [Google isn't the only culprit. Facebook also customizes content, using information on the links people click to tailor the news that appears in their personal feeds. Pariser, a progressive, says he has tried hard to add conservative friends to his own Facebook feed but their links and feeds keep getting blocked by Facebook's personalization algorithms.]

"What you see on your screen may be different from what the person sitting next to you sees during a similar Google search," Pariser told the gathering of more than 600 social change advocates, social entrepreneurs and open-government activists. "...We really need to get away from that silly idea that (computer) code doesn't care about anything."

Data-filtering isn't new, of course. But these new filter bubbles differ from what we've seen before, and in three key ways, Pariser says. First, the degree of personalization is higher. You're no longer simply being grouped with a bunch of people who read The Nation. Now you're alone in your bubble. Second, filter bubbles are invisible. You don't realize they exist; you can't see them. And third? You don't choose them. They choose you. "As the face of curation of what we see and consume online changes from a person to a machiine, we need to start questioning the values of these filtering devices and get the power back to make these decisions for ourselves," Pariser says. "The filter bubble may be good for consumers but it's bad for democracy."

Other assertions made by presenters:

* There is racial segregation on the Web, even in trending topics on Twitter. According to data visualization experts Fernanda Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, the thousands of hashtags being used to collate and segment different conversations by topic also may be keeping many people out of the short-messaging site's most popular and/or important conversations. Example: Two of the top-trending topics over the recent Memorial Day weekend -- #cookout and #oilspill -- were starkly segmented along racial lines. Viegas said the #cookout conversation was attended mostly by blacks and #oilspill, mostly by whites during the same period. "Hashtags are the bumper stickers of the 21st Century," said Wattenberg. Added Viegas: "On many topics, it's a heterogeneous crowd, but there's a whole other chunk of topics where race divides people. We need to be aware that even online, we can be immersing ourselves in conversations that are segregated in ways that might be worrisome."

* We are not using the social media tools we have to solve problems so much as we are using them to socialize with like-minded people about these problems. It's time to get more active offline, said Clay Johnson, the director of Sunlight Labs and cofounder of the online political strategy firm, Blue State Digital. Social entrepreneurs and activists need to focus less on using social media to build email lists and focus more on getting people active offline solving social problems, he said. He cited the online social network, Momsrising.org, as a good example of a social network that is highly civically engaged, using government data on health, education and economic trends to create a "Moms Score" to help catalyze offline protests and social change.

* We must work harder to break out of these self-imposed (or machine-imposed) comfort zones if we're to affect social change. "We are too focused on climbing the hierarchy ladder in our workplaces and social networks online, and not focused enough on dismantling these hierarchies, which is where the true power lies," said Deanna Zandt, a social media consultant and author of Share This! a new book about social networking. "We're living like fish right now," she said. "We don't know we're wet. We're taking our perception that the Net is a wonderful meritocracy but that's not true. We need to interrupt this pattern of thinking immediately." Zandt urged conferees to shatter their comfort zones to start making the Net a more hospitable place for civic engagement. "We have to work harder at civic engagement online," she said. Zandt, who is white, shared her own experience of finding herself in an unexpected discussion on Twitter about race in America after she spoke out against an action last summer by Philadelphia's Valley Club to ban black children from swimming in its pool. "This was completely outrageous, I got really angry about it and signed petitions and all of that, but what was more interesting was what happened in the days following that," Zandt said. "People started sharing on Twitter about the first time they'd been discriminated against as children and this blew me away. I wouldn't have found myself in a group of people of color, sharing stories about discrimination without Twitter" and without "stepping out."

* We must stop enabling the status quo. John Perry Barlow, the founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a 20-year-old nonprofit digital rights advocacy group, told the gathering that he stands by his earlier statement, made many years ago, that "the Internet is the most powerful event since the capture of fire." Barlow said there is massive power in the hands of individuals, thanks to the Web, but this is power that destabilizes the status quo and can cut both ways, for better and worse. Most people still don't know how to use this Web power to organize and affect social change. But they are learning, he said. "We have to stop expecting the government to shower us with things it can no longer deliver," he said, "and start running this country and our institutions (including companies) the same way the Internet is run, from the edges."

* We must stop assuming that civic engagement will occur online on its own. James Fishkin, the director of the Center for Deliberative Democracy at Stanford University, said the best way to boost public deliberation online is to create it. Fishkin says that the current way we "self-select" our social networks online has led to only the most extreme views being heard by one group or another. He suggested a five-step "Deliberative Polling" methodology to start creating issues circles, which first gets all stakeholders together from all sides of an argument to agree to a set of detailed survey questions that will help frame a debate around issues where civic engagement is most needed. Second, select 500 people who represent specific groups across viewpoints to participate. Third, send them the survey. Fourth, assemble them in small groups and facilitate discussion and deliberation, either online or in person. Fifth and last, survey the participants again to see if their opinions have changed as a result of that engagement.

* The Net can be a force for civic engagement, especially in societies around the world where there has been none before. Ethan Zuckerman -- a social media expert, blogger, founder of Tripod.com, a Web hosting enterprise, and cofounder of Global Voices, an internationally crowdsourced news site -- said the Net "really changes things in the long-term by creating a new public space, one that in most closed societies around the world is not available any other way."

What do you think? Does the surge of online social networks and corporate use of Net filters to segment consumers of their products make it harder for people to engage with one another -- in or out of the workplace? Let us hear from you.

-- By Marcia Stepanek

[Photo-illustration: istock.com]

Conferences for Good

Here's a quick-and-dirty list of some of the top social innovation conferences and conversations taking place this summer through December 2010.

This list is long but not complete; please share any important events that we may have overlooked.

An updated list of events will be issued in August.

Cause Marketing Forum - June 2 and 3 in Chicago

Global Youth Rework the World Summit - June 2-5 in Leksand, Sweden

Personal Democracy Forum - June 3 and 4 in NYC

Journalism That Matters - June 3-6 in Detroit

TEDxRotterdam - June 4 in Rotterdam

Fast Company's Most Creative People in Business - June 6 in NYC

Conference on Innovation Journalism - June 7-1 Palo Alto, CA

Rewire London - June 8 in London

Mashable Media Summit - June 8 in NYC

The 4th Annual Climate Change Summit 2010 - June 8 and 9 in London

Women Deliver Global Conference - June 7-9 in Washington, DC

New Media Consortium - June 9-12 in Anaheim, CA

ReadWriteWeb's Real-Time Web Summit - June 11 in NYC

Mobile Tech for Social Entrepreneurs - June 12 in London

Scaling Social Impact Conference - June 17 and 18 in NYC

Allied Media Conference - June 18-20 in Detroit

TEDxTasmania - June 18 in Launceston, Tasmania

TEDxStockholm - June 19 in Stockholm

TEDxPerth - June 21 in Perth

NetSquared Camp Portland - June 25 in Portland, Oregon

NCTech4Good Conference - June 25 in Chapel Hill, NC

Nonprofit 2.0 Unconference - June 25 in Washington, DC

TEDxMadrid - June 26 in Madrid, Spain

iSociety International Conference - June 28-30 in London

National Conference on Volunteering and Service - June 28-30 in NYC

Cloud Computing and Enterprise 2.0 World Forum - June 29-July 1 in London

Aspen Ideas Festival - July 5-11 in Aspen, CO

International Development Design Summit - July 7 in Fort Collins, CO

TEDxAbuja - July 10 in Abuja, Nigeria

TEDGlobal "And Now the Good News" Conference- July 12-16 in Oxford, UK

Cosi10: Alternative Currencies in Social Entrepreneurship - July 16-18 in Brussels

Cosi10: Change Your City Denver - July 16-18 in Denver

Cosi10: Social Innovation Online - July 16-18 in Shanghai

Netroots Nation - July 22-25 in Las Vegas

TEDxBoston - July 29 in Boston

TEDxBoulder - August 7 in Boulder

Big South Social Media Summit - August 13 in Nashville, TN

Second Life Community Convention - August 13-15 in Boston

Craigslist Foundation Boot Camp - August 14 in Berkeley, CA

Cosi10: Strategies to Foster Innovation - August 20-22 in Chicago

Cosi10: Social Enterprise in the Developing World - August 20-22 in Delhi, India

Philanthropy Australia Conference 2010 - August 31-September 1 in Melbourne

Gov2.0 Summit - September 7 and 8 in Washington, DC

CSR Asia Summit - September 14 and 15 in Hong Kong

Clinton Global Initiative - September 21-24 in NYC

CUSP Conference - September 22 and 23 in Chicago

Paris 2.0 - September 22-25 in Paris

Web of Change Conference - September 22-26 in Hollyhock, Cortes Island, British Columbia

TEDxAuckland - September 26 in Auckland, NZ

Mobile Giving Conference - September 27 and 28 in Malibu, Los Angeles

The IdeaFestival - September 29-October 2 in Louisville, KY

GoingGreen West - September in Sausalito, CA

Open Video Conference - October 1 and 2 in NYC

Social Capital Markets Conference - October 4-6 in San Francisco

BlogWorld Expo - October 14-16 in Las Vegas

Opportunity Collaboration CSR Conference - October 15-20 in Ixtapa, Mexico

Bioneers - October 15-18 in San Rafael, CA

The Feast Conference 2010 - October 15 in NYC

Blackbaud's 2010 Confeence for Nonprofits - October 20-22 in Washington, DC

Independent Sector's 2010 National Conference - October 20-22 in Atlanta

PopTech - October 20-23 in Camden, ME

Social Ventures 2010 Conference - October 21-23 in Long Beach, CA

TEDMED 2010 - October 26-29 in San Diego

Justmeans Social Media, Technology and Change Conference - November 1 in NYC

TEDxHonolulu Shift Conference - November 4 in Honolulu

Web 2.0 Summit - November 15-17 in San Francisco

European Venture Philanthropy Association - November 16 and 17 in Luxembourg

TEDxYouth Conference - November 20 worldwide

GlobalGreen Awards - November 25 in London

Medicine 2.0 - November 29 and 30 in Maastricht, The Netherlands

Conference on Philanthropy and Leadership - December 3 in Boston

We'll be updating this list again in the fall. Please share any conferences we've missed.

-- Compiled by Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration: istock.com)
(This post first appeared in Justmeans.com and appears here with permission.)

Network-ready

Collaboration is one of the year's most aggressive new trends; two sessions at the Skoll World Forum explored the increasing use of social media by social change advocates to leverage their networks for greater impact.

It's one of the many trends I've been tracking for a book I'm writing, Swarms, about the rise of online networks and their increasing ability to aggressively (and sometimes abrasively) reshape establishment business, politics, media, philanthropy and other institutions.

Bruno Giussani, the European director of the TED conferences and a moderator of one of the panels on social media, said that "the reach of the Web is such that it is becoming far more inclusionary than exclusionary. When we have a phenomenon such as this occurring at this scale, it creates a world in which everywhere something serious and important is happening, we are camera-ready to capture a movement and network-ready to pass on that information to the rest of the world. Human rights abuses are no longer as easy to conceal."

Here are some other ways that social media are starting to influence activism:

*Social media create a common ground and "safer channels" for collaboration. Niche groups and networks are teaming up, increasingly, using the Web to share information and benefit mutual causes and goals. Mona Eltahawy, a speaker and blogger on Middle East issues, said Saudi women are starting to use YouTube, blogs, and Facebook to come together in their struggle for equal rights, including the right to vote and to drive. Eltahawy told the story of one activist in Saudi Arabia who asked a friend to make a YouTube video of her driving and verbally urging governmental authorities to lift the ban on women drivers. She then posted it online, then CNN picked up the story. It triggered a movement. Eltahawy says social networks are helping to consolidate multiple, individual efforts for change and help women activists to find each other. Eltahawy also says social media are giving Saudi activists a "safe space" in which to collaborate. "The government is less likely to mess with someone who's been on YouTube and CNN," she said.

*Social media are giving greater visibility and earlier credibility to new ideas. Kiva and Samasource (both present at this year's Skoll forum) said social media helped them to get funding and favorable attention early on; both said social media can help to rapidly spread new ideas and models for change in ways not possible before. New ideas used to have to pass muster by establishment "gatekeepers" before social media came along. Not entirely true anymore: Premal Shah, founder of Kiva, said a Frontline piece on his enterprise -- when shared virally on the Web and across key social networks -- became instrumental in giving the company the attention it needed at a dire point in its rollout to get funded and scale. Another example of a new activist community that is growing as a result of social media: Xindanwei, a new Chinese company that is helping would-be social entrepreneurs in China to find each other, collaborate, and scale.

* Social media are enabling social enterprises and established institutions to crowd-source some of their work. Responding to a question by a New York Times reporter about how the Web is changing journalism, panelist Joi Ito (the CEO of Creative Commons) advised him to "think of social media as your new newsroom." Organizations no longer have to do everything by themselves, he said. The social Web is changing the way people work. Collaboration between mainstream media and citizen journalists, for example, can reap better and more accurate reportage of current events, regardless of waning news budgets, Ito said.

To be sure, social media are still very new -- especially as a form of collaboration in the social entrepreneurial sector. But give it time, says Ito. "We're just beginning to see the impact of social networks on social innovation."

The Skoll conference ends tonight. Watch this space for further highlights and roundups.

--By Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration: istock.com)

Coat-tail Crowds

Parties have "after parties." Panel talks have the "back channel." (Think Twitter.) Now, on the fringe of this week's invitation-only Skoll World Forum on social entrepreneurship in Oxford, there is something new: "coat-tail" conferences -- actually, a couple of small, satellite events scheduled to occur simultaneously around the Skoll gathering but which aim to include more of the crowd in the discussion.

One of the coat-tail events is an "e-Philanthropy" conference, sponsored by the Oxford Internet Institute, being held just up the road from the Said Business School, the epicenter of the Skoll gathering. Much of the talk there has been about how philanthropy needs to become more effective in solving social problems and measuring impact. A second fringe event, called Oxford Jam, is being held across the street. Founder Ben Metz, a former Ashoka Fellow, says his event is intended "to provide another space for conversation" that mixes up people attending the Forum and those not invited. With a logo that reads, "Oxford Jam: Spread Evenly," Metz's event also seeks to raise the visibility of younger and more diverse social change activists with a spirited menu of scheduled conversations, breakfast meet-ups and dinner collaboration exercises.

For the past two years, Metz says, he has been attending the Skoll conferences, hosting a dinner off-conference during each. Last year, he said, attendance at his dinner jumped from 25 people at the first one to more than 100 at the second, with many attendees coming up to him later telling him that "the dinner was actually more produtive than the whole of Skoll put together," Metz says. So this year, Metz decided to expand his annual dinner into a three-day ''jam.''

So far, so good, he says. His opening 'jam' sessions on Wednesday included some Skoll attendees who decided to stop by between Skoll pre-sessions, and Metz expected many more to attend his events through Friday's close.

Metz, though, insists his fringe sessions aren't "just a Skoll thing" but rather a sign of how the ''big conference model'' is changing across the sector, thanks to the Web and social media. "It's really about the growing influence of Web-powered crowds," he says. "The wisdom in any one room is much greater than what you can find on a platform (at a more traditional conference)," he added. "Why don't we as a community start looking at (new conference) structures that will harness the widsom of the crowd more effectively for the benefit of all?"

Metz says there is a place for panel discussions -- much of the Skoll forum's format and still the traditional format of choice at many events. But he said that new Web-wired crowds also now want to have broader and more spontaneous interchanges on the fringes of traditional big conferences that can "uncover hidden talent and hidden gems where you didn't see them before."

Metz predicts the coat-tail conferencing trend will take off across the social action sectors. "I think there's an arc that's just starting which you see in crowd-funding and crowd-sourcing that has yet to hit conferences and physical interactions all around," Metz says. Oxford Jam is a beginning. "We'll see how this goes," he says. "It's an experiment. By the end of the week, we could crash and burn or be wildly successful."

Watch this space for updates.

-- Marcia Stepanek

(Illustration by istock.com)

Global Upstarts

The latest Global Entrepreneurship Monitor was launched today in Santiago, Chile, and it’s showing that young social entrepreneurs are rising in influence and number across the world, chiefly in innovation-driven economies.

It was the first time that the 10-year-old survey partnership between the London Business School and Babson College—the largest single study of entrepreneurial activity in the world—included a measure of new social enterprise activity in its annual survey.

GEM's key findings on social entrepreneurship across the 49 countries it researched show that in 2009:

* Social entrepreneurial activity appeared to rise slightly with a country’s stage of economic development. “Individuals in richer countries, having satisfied their own basic needs, may be more likely to turn to the needs of others,” the study said. “In other words, the opportunity cost of social entrepreneurship may be higher in developing countries.”

* More men than women started socially oriented ventures.

* Social entrepreneurs tended to be active at younger ages than business entrepreneurs.

* Better-educated individuals were more likely to be social entrepreneurs.

* Social ventures were started in a variety of areas—notably education, health, culture, economic development, and the environment.

* The distinction between “social” and “regular” entrepreneurship was sometimes blurred. However, GEM says that social objectives (not-for-profit and hybrid social enterprises) still prevailed over more economic (for-profit social enterprises) and less innovative ones (traditional NGOS).

* Social entrepreneurial activity was much lower than traditional entrepreneurial activity in almost all countries surveyed, though in some countries (chiefly Peru, Colombia, Venezuela and Jamaica), there was a significant overlap of social and business entrepreneurship, suggesting that 'social' and 'busines' entrepreneurship categories may be blurred.

* Social entrepreneurs differed widely in the type of organizations they launched and the kind of social or environmental problems they tried to solve. Social enterprises identified in the report spanned a broad spectrum of categories, including education, health, culture, economic development and the environment.

* There were differences in social issue focus among the countries, depending on their level of economic development. "Social entrepreneurs in (developing) economies tend to focus on more elementary issues and pressing needs such as basic health care provision, access to water and sanitation or agricultural activities in rural areas," the report said. "In innovation-driven economies, individuals are particularly active in launching culture-related organizations, providing services for disabled people, focusing on waste recycling and nature protection or offering open-source activities such as online social networking."

GEM researchers, to help measure activity, created four classifications of social enterprise: traditional NGOs (which, GEM says, have high levels of social/environment goals and not-for-profit status); not-for-profit social enterprises (which have high levels of social/environmental goals; not-for-profit status, and innovation); hybrid social enterprises (with high levels of social/environmental goals and earned income strategies either “integrated” or “complementary” to their missions), and for-profit social enterprises (which have high but not exclusively social/environmental goals and earned income strategies.)

Across all 49 countries surveyed, not-for-profit social enterprises were most prevalent (24%); followed by hybrid for-profit/nonprofit models; for-profit social enterprises (12%), and traditional NGOs (8%). There were regional preferences: hybrids, for example, were most popular with social entrepreneurs in the Scandinavian countries of Finland and Iceland, as well as in Algeria, Uganda, the Dominican Republic, Hungary, Latvia, Malaysia, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Slovenia and Switzerland. Meanwhile, the for-profit social enterprise model is most favored, GEM says, by the United Arab Emirates, Venezuela and Romania.

And that's not all. While the rate of social entrepreneurial activity is dwarfed by traditional enterprise activity in developing countries, there is a “significant” component of social entrepreneurship in many innovation-driven, richer countries. “A significant minority of social entrepreneurs, particularly in developing countries, appear to wish to have a profitable businesses that at the same time addresses social issues,” the report said. “This demonstrates that for many people, the categories of 'social' and 'business' entrepreneur are artificial, and more holistic definitions of entrepreneurship are needed if we are to capture the true extent of this phenomenon.”

What do you think? Let us hear from you.

Top Social Innovation Conferences

Here's a quick-and-dirty list of some of the top social innovation conferences and conversations taking place through June 2010.

This list isn't complete; please share any events we've overlooked. A list of July-December 2010 events will be issued in the spring.



Social Fresh Nashville - January 11 in Nashville, TN

World's Fair Use Day - January 12 in Washington, DC

TheFunded.com's FounderShowcase - January 14 in Palo Alto, CA

Solutions Lab 2010 - Green Innovation in Business - January 28 at Duke University

Catalyst Conference - January 26 at Commonwealth Club in San Francisco

Enterprise Social 2.0: RIP or ROI? - January 27-28 in Amsterdam, The Netherlands

World Economic Forum - January 27-31 in Davos, Switzerland

Design Revolution RoadShow - Starting in February and crossing the country

Social Enterprise Coalition's Voice Conference - February 1-2 in Cardiff, Wales

Social Media Week - February 1-5 simultaneously in New York City, Berlin, London, San Francisco, Toronto, and Sao Paulo

Social Entrepreneur Unconference - February 5-7 in Portland, OR

New Partners for Smart Growth - February 4-6 in Seattle, WA

TED - February 9-13 in Long Beach, CA

Online Community Unconference East - February 10 in New York City

Tech4Society - February 11-13 in Hyderabad, India

Free Culture X - February 13-14 in Washington DC

Future of Funding Conference - February 18 in San Mateo, CA

Digital Media and Learning Conference - February 18-20 in La Jolla, CA

IMAGINE Solutions - February 22-23 in Naples, FL

Social Enterprise Conference - February 27-28 at Harvard Business School and Harvard Kennedy School in Cambridge, MA

2010 Media Summit - March 10-11 in New York City

South by Southwest - March 12-21 in Austin, TX

Social Venture Capital/Social Enterprise Conference - March 16-18 in Miami

Social Networking World Forum Europe - March 15-16 in London

Social Media for Stakeholder Engagement - March 19 in London

Social Innovation Awards - March 24 in New York City

March Madness for the Mind - March 26-27 in San Francisco

O'Reilly WHERE 2.0 Conference on geolocation - March 30-April 1 in San Jose, CA

Digital Now Conference - April 7-10 in Orlando, FL

NTEN - April 8-10 in Atlanta

GEO - April 12-14 in Pittsburgh

Skoll World Forum - April 14-16 in Oxford, UK

GH/Innovate 2010 - April 17-18 at Yale University in New Haven, CT

Global Philanthropy Forum - April 18-21 in Redwood City, CA

140 Characters Conference NYC - April 20-21 in New York City

SOCAP International 2010 Symposium - April 25-28 in Atlanta

Milken Global Forum - April 26-28 in Los Angeles

Revisioning Value - April 26-27 in Portland, OR

Social Enterprise Alliance World Summit - April 28-30 in San Francisco

Web 2.0 Expo - May 3-6 in San Francisco

Finovate Spring 2010 - May 11 in New York City

The New Entrepreneur Conference 2010 - May 13-14 in Dusseldorf, Germany

Gov 2.0 Expo - May 25-27 in Washington, DC

Women Deliver Global Conference - June 7-9 in Washington, DC

Personal Democracy Forum - June 21-22 in New York City

iSociety International Conference - June 28-30 in London


-- Compiled by Marcia Stepanek


(Illustration by Miroslaw Pieprzyk for istock.com)

(This post first appeared on Justmeans and is reposted here with permission)