Many entrepreneurs face the trade off on where to spend their time.  Where is value added the most?  Should I spend time at this meet and greet event, hoping to grow my network, or spend the time buried back in the office with the team perfecting our product and discussing strategy?

Social entrepreneurs often enter a space where experience, competitors, and new entrants are sparse.  The level of documented intellectual property and lack of industry veterans to seek out makes succeeding even more difficult.  Yet these resources are critical to gaining tracking in the market and ensuring your idea lives to see the next day.

Triple Pundit wrote  a great piece on shifting more to collaboration between NGOs and businesses.  If values are aligned, – which is no standard clause; value misalignment can be the most critical downfall to partnerships  - the complementary skillsets can mean more impact. Read more »

As many entrepreneurs are familiar with, one of the must-reads when starting a business is the book The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.  It’s a useful read no matter what sized organization you’re with, and the principles that the book are founded upon can be applied anywhere.

I won’t go too much into the application of the Lean Startup Methodology in the social enterprise realm (as an aside, check out Social Earth for a good take on that).  However, I think that some of the principles that a startup can learn from can be applied when looking at the social enterprise industry or even sub-sets of industries.

Validated Learning Cycles (VLCs),  a term that is used to describe the rapid development cycles of building, measuring, and learning from your product, is typically done in isolation during your initial stages.   The energy put into spreading your product and gathering user feedback is tremendous.  But, what happens to the feedback that you’ve gained? Read more »

“Find a job that you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”

- Confucius

When you’re passionate about your work or your hobby, the ‘work’ becomes less of a drag, and you’re eager to learn and produce more.  But what if that very passion gets tested by an outsider?

Sharing your work/passion with others is a critical part to evolving the idea and making sure it is as strong as possible.   No one can develop the perfect idea or product in a vacuum without seeking – and more importantly – incorporating feedback.  Hearing someone’s reaction about your passion can be a very humbling experience.

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For American readers, do you remember those charity cardboard boxes you would get in grade school that you had to assemble in order to deposit donations to the poor?  The instructions on the side of the box alluded to the fact that by every coin you dropped in, you were helping a home.

Then came those television commercials that opted for the ‘in-your-face’ method of thrusting horribly poverty-stricken scenarios into your living room (most likely as you stuffed your face with TV dinners). They attempted to bring the images of poverty close to home in the hopes that this would drive more donations – potentially out of guilt.  As a gift for donating, you would receive a packet in the (snail) mail providing you details on your recipient.  Yet, it still felt disconnected. Read more »

As 2012 begins, much of the same negative rhetoric is surrounding microfinance institutions, but it seems that the industry is responding slowly but surely with much needed regulation and unity.

As the year goes on, I don’t anticipate these negative examples going completely away. As it becomes more commonplace for these examples to be revealed, more and more stories of usuary and MFI abuse will start to filter out. While it can be easy to view it as a black eye on the microfinance industry, I anticipate this will continue to fuel the call for more increased regulation and greater transparency into the industry. Read more »

I’m currently traveling through India, and one of the most interesting things to me is how traffic operates.  Coming from the US, at first glance it appears that everything is chaotic and without order.  Upon closer examination, it’s so much more.

Cars, buses, bikes, bicycles, rickshaws, pedestrians all finding a way to dodge each other and get to their destination safely.  It’s wild – but it works.

Enforcing strict rules such as adhering to lanes, crossing only at crosswalks, and stopping completely at traffic lights seem counter productive and might only serve to add more to the congestion. Read more »