nuance intelligence

For those of us interested in alternative economics, it was a very interesting week on the Front Range of Colorado.  There was significant activity among and between many groups who are innovating better ways to flow capital (financial capital, sure, and also social, human, intellectual and natural capital) through our economy and society.

Slow Money, a movement that evolved from Investor’s Circle, is a new network of investors focused on making long-view investments which accept below-market rates in addition to social and natural captial returns related to localized, organic food systems.  Fast Money metaphorically defines the success of Boulder’s TechStars web 2.0 startups, which are moving at speeds reminiscent of Silicon Valley circa 1998.  Local money was at the hub of the Business Association for Local Living Economies (BALLE) annual conference.  And sustainable money reared its head in the form of a new bank that has been founded from the ground up on sustainable principles.

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This project has been a long time in the making.  For the 15 months, I’ve been advising and collaborating with the Business Catapult team, who have a unique vision on how to build and support a rich network of entrepreneurial business ecologies.

My passion in this arena is in helping progressive organizations increase their ability to change social and business processes in pursuit a sustainable society. Some people call these folks social entrepreneurs, while others think about triple-bottom-line economics.  The next generation of these concepts provide more relevant guidance; check out important work at Blended Value and B Corporation, which each provide frameworks that provide some combination of organizing principles, community and shared values for this new breed of entrepreneur.

This week, we are taking the wraps off a new survey for Business Catapult that applies sustainable business principles to the process of founding and early-stage investing in sustainable companies.  Starting this Thursday (May 21) and running for about eight weeks, we have a series of working review sessions with several different groups, including sustainability metrics experts, social entrepreneurs, traditional entrepreneurs, progressive investors, traditional angel investors and others interested in the space.

These sessions will be conducted in small, in-person groups in Boulder and Denver.  If you want to get involved, please contact me directly, either via email (address is found on my ‘about‘ page), LinkedIn, or Twitter (@nuance_intel).  Do contact me even if you are not living or working in Colorado; many of our advisors live around the world, and we can setup conference calls and other ways to connect.

People who think their social business concept is too important or too smart to share with people, and needs to be protected from prying eyes and potential copycats will probably not understand what’s going on at Futureshifters right now.

Social entrepreneurs from around the world are freely sharing their ideas for socially-minded businesses that ought to get started.  The  idea was inspired by Seth Godin.  As Futureshifter Zack Schwartzman explains, Continue reading

The White House has made a huge push into supporting social innovation.  The first hundred days of the administration included some non-trivial activity, including bringing on a team of some of the nation’s highest profile social innovators — including Sonal Shah (formerly at Google.org) and Van Jones (formerly of GreenForAll) — to their new Office of Social Innovation, and announcing plans for a $50 million social innovation fund.

In two recent blog posts at nuPOLIS, Pete Plastrik talks about what it’s going to take to actually make social innovations scale:

• Social Innovation Puzzle: What’s Inside, Outside the Box?: When the Obama administration announced it wanted $50 million for a “social innovation fund” to help finance and expand promising nonprofit organizations, it seemed to miss some of the more interesting sources of social innovation that are available. The notion that nonprofit organizations are the “it” of social innovation is a narrow one long embraced by foundations and reinforced by IRS rules. But most nonprofits are “program oriented” and don’t tap into the power of market forces to spread change at large scale.

• To Stimulate Social Innovation, Create a Network of Federal “Labs” Like Those for Science and Health – Starting with Workforce Development: … the process for developing social innovations is far more fragmented, less disciplined, slower, and lacks clear financial incentives.  Except in exceptional situations, social entrepreneurs are isolated from each other and the means for scaling up ideas; are undercapitalized; have weak due diligence and market-testing processes; have weak connections to private businesses and markets; and depend substantially on the philanthropic sector’s idiosyncratic and relatively small “capital markets.” With only some modest exceptions, the social sector lacks a robust applied R&D function.

We sincerely hope the administration’s leaders can listen to the unsung and hardworking social innovation leaders, and balance the very real need to act quickly with an ability to act wisely.

The partnership with Innovation Networks for Communities, which centers on the development of nuPOLIS.com, has been a fascinating and rewarding journey into scalable social innovation.

Here is the May Update from this amazing network of innovators:

Online release of Chapter 2–”The Disruption of Community Life”–of new book: How Social Innovators are Transforming America’s Communities by Peter Plastrik and Theodore Staton. “Visit San Francisco, New York, Worchester, or nearly any community in America, talk to its leaders, look at their newspapers and data—as we have—and you will be struck by the presence of disruption wherever you go. In small and mid-size cities; gigantic metropolitan regions and rural towns—the largest, most complex places and the smallest, simplest ones—five forces of disruption are imposing new realities: economic globalization, environmental damage, cultural division, immigration, and self-empowered citizens…”

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