nuance intelligence

We just posted an updated agenda for the Sustainable Enterprise Business Models meetup, scheduled for 5:30pm, October 12th in Boulder.

The participant contribution and encouraging feedback has significantly shaped this month’s agenda, which will address the need for a common taxonomy that provides common language, and also discuss our high-level goals, outcomes and simple metrics we can use to guide the evolution of the program and discussion.

The goals for the rest of the year’s meetups include:

• Add a monthly Denver meetup (November).
• Begin a more technical review of metrics
• Begin in-depth reviews of leading sustainable enterprises in the Front Range, as we intended from the beginning.
  • we can’t confirm it yet, but could have one of Colorado’s favorite sustainable companies talking about how to participate
• Support the Angel Capital Summit on November 17th with a lunchtime mini-meetup brownbag lunch session.  (more to be announced on this shortly)

We hope to see you there, and encourage the collective wisdom of this community to continue guiding our actions.

Welcome to our report of what happened at the inaugural Sustainable Business Models Collective meetup in Boulder. Here’s what we set out to do:

PURPOSE
The purpose of this meetup is to provide a place to discuss the specifics of funding, creating and running a sustainable social enterprise. This emerging sector, which spans the for-profit and non-profit worlds, is still taking shape, and there is no silver bullet solution for people who want to create socially- and environmentally-impactful organizations that can thrive for generations. So we need to create the framework in which we operate.

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The Angel Capital Summit (ACS) is scheduled for November 17th, with last week’s call for presenters, and an application deadline on October 15th.  The ACS runs on a more-or-less traditional pitch format, with 40 organizations pitching in a day.  Dozens of partner organizations nominate businesses into the semi-final judging round (run on Business Catapult services) that identifies the 40 organizations who will pitch live at the event.

Setting aside the vagaries of what social entrpreneurism is and isn’t (we discuss that at the dedicated meetup), the ACS is encouraging both non-profit and for-profit mission-driven organizations to apply for the opportunity to present their enterprise at the event.

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Check out #SoCapCO on twitter to track the discussion of all things related to social enterprise in Colorado.  The hashtag’s origin starts at the SoCap conference, but also implies lots of aspects we like about the social enterprise movement, with the multiple meanings for social capital, and the “co” representing Colorado, collaboration, collective and lots of other things we do together.

Topping a ten-day period of sustainability-inspired thinking pervading economic reporting in the gray-flannel-media, the old gray lady reports (PW req’d) that French President Nicolas Sarkozy initiated a shift in how the French government reports economic activity (story tip to three of favorite tweeters: @NurtureGirl, @kevindoylejones and @byrnegreen).

President Nicolas Sarkozy told the French national statistics agency Monday to take greater account of factors like quality of life and the environment when measuring the country’s economic health.

Mr. Sarkozy made the request after accepting a report from a panel of top economists he had charged with reviewing the adequacy of the current standard of fiscal well-being: gross domestic product.

The panel, chaired by two Nobel economists, Joseph E. Stiglitz of Columbia University and Amartya Sen of Harvard University, concluded that G.D.P. was insufficient and that measures of sustainability and human well-being should be included.

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When The Wall St. Journal Online covers the growing complementary currency movement in the same week that The Economist talks about triple-bottom-line values encroaching on traditional investing, it appears that maybe, just maybe, the consciousness around money is finally changing.

In the most recent installment, WSJ’s video report covers a wide range of popular currency initiatives, including reputation- and attention-based incentives.  Our long-time partners at the Metacurrency Project and The New Currency Frontier blog were featured in the piece, even though their ground-breaking work does not suit a 101 crowd.

As we wrote in an in-depth review of online and social network currencies this summer, there is a fair bit of refinement needed in many of the systems. Continue reading

There were many great discussions at the three-day Social Capital Markets (SoCap) conference this week at Fort Mason in San Francisco.  We’ll keep reporting and referring to these in the days, weeks and months to come.  Among their many accomplishments was a mastery of social media, including a dense twitter feed, viewable at #socap09, as well as an intelligent collective blogging approach.

One of the themes, championed by Jed Emerson, among many other high-profile thought leaders, was taking the concepts of impact investing (seeking social and environmental returns alongside the financial) into mainstream finance.  Within the broad context any community, this is just one of the many goals and missions we heard about.

But it is the one The Economist picked up on, unsurprisingly, in their day-after summary (tip of the hat to Ben Metz for bringing it to our attention).  Remember, this is the same publication who published  the cover (image at right) that Woody Tasch is using in his Slow Money road show.

They introduced their framing with the capital markets collapse a year ago: Continue reading

August was another fascinating month over at nuPOLIS.  A quick survey around the network reveals a peek from behind the scenes of the Chicago climate change planning process, a redux of a piece on Ethical Travel drawing on the first round of feedback, and a look at why Detroit is a hotbed for school reform.

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