nuance intelligence

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

Social entrepreneurs are often challenged by the legal structure of their new enterprise.  These entrepreneurs weigh a long list of pros and cons between for-profit and non-profit.  A new entity, the Low-Profit Limited Liability Company (L3C).

This email from Martin Montero (@montero on Twitter — worthy of a follow), co-founder of the Austin Social Innovation Hub outlines the new legal structure of the L3C.  Posted with his permission for your interest: Continue reading

Just read about Sharespost on this Mashable piece on the valuation of Facebook and LinkedIn.  (for those of you who can’t handle the suspense: Facebook is worth about $4 billion, and LinkedIn about $1.5 billion).

Most of the companies listed are web2.0 companies, many of which you may know.  Almost all are Silicon Valley companies, creating a bit of a “local stock exchange” atmosphere.  Some alt.energy and biotech firms are listed, as well as Tesla Motors.

There are a few pretty interesting things about Sharespost: Continue reading

In addition to the fact that Denver has now twice been identified as the major metro area best poised for economic recovery (tip to newbie tweeter Adam Rentschler), there’s some pretty exciting progressive economic activity happening up and down the Front Range.

Coming up on July 9th is the Responsible Economy Roundtable, hosted by Richard Eidlin and his new firm, Progress Group.   Our firms share a goal, which is to catalyze support for social entrepreneurs, which Eidlin describes as “triple bottom line (financial, social and environmental) businesses that use market-based strategies to advance a social mission, while generating revenue.”

“The Roundtable is dedicated to supporting the next generation of Denver-area social entrepreneurs from underserved communities, who have the talent and vision, but lack the necessary resources to scale their idea. The goal is to connect these innovative people and their good ideas to business leaders and civic organizations with resources. A particular objective is to deepen the involvement of the private sector.”

We’re not only totally aligned, but fully participating in the Roundtable, as well as the greater movement. This session fits into an ongoing discussion in Denver, Boulder, Fort Collins and points in-between.  This fall and winter, the Local Capital Summit and Angel Capital Summit are both poised to maintain the momentum.  Both events are run by our long-term colleagues, and without stealing their thunder, we know you’ll learn about new tools, collaborations and opportunities at each event, which will build toward a more vibrant and sustainable economy in Colorado.

Care to play? Join us on July 9th.

The only thing we have to fear is…. doing nothing.

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.

I wrote this yesterday at the AWhere Blog: Geo-Analytics Transforms CA Politics.  It’s a story told in ever-increasing zoom about how the Proposition 8 opponents Google Mapped the pro-Prop8 donors.  An interesting and intense demonstration of how location intelligence and mapping creates actionable insight.

Final Screen Shot: Street View, Anyone?

Apologies for the deafening silence over here.  Busy on a research project, a web-development project (that’s almost done) and firming up my retainer clients for 2009.  Living the “Be The Change” movement of Obama and beyond, and will have a lot to talk about in another few weeks, so expect this space to heat back up.

In the meantime, I am keeping up with my Twittering (tweeting — still mildly repulsed by the whole lexicon in there. i mean “tweeple”?   seriously?)  and Deliciousing (sadly, it, too, will probably be a word soon enough), so if you want some “in between the lines” hints on things I’m working on, they are two good places to look.

In addition, here are some good blog posts I written elsewhere this month which are more specific to individual projects, but should be interesting to you nonetheless:

AWhere

• Climate Is Business’ Biggest Challenge: The business impacts of climate change will dwarf the current economic downturn. Learn how to integrate the most accurate climate change models into your business planning.
• Transform Business Intelligence:  Transform your existing business intelligence information into decision-improving knowledge and understanding.

Business Catapult

• Obama, Reform and Stimulating Angel Investing:  A wide variety of cautions and advice to the Obama administration.

More to come, soon. Thanks for reading.

My latest column just ran at Colorado Biz magazine.  It investigates alt.energy investments at any level, from the WalMart shopper to President Obama.   Here’s an excerpt:

Angel-level investing
If you are a bona-fide angel investor, looking to cash in on clean-tech, there are two places where an investment of a couple hundred thousand dollars will actually create a reasonable return in a reasonable amount of time. Service companies are focused in two areas, distributed generation and energy efficiency or conservation.
Average cost: Investments in smaller companies are generally made in no less than $25,000 increments.
Expected return: In a recent study by the Kauffman Foundation, angel capital investments returned 2.6 times the initial investment over 3.5 years, for a 27 percent internal rate of return. Of course, performance here varies heavily, and 52 percent of investors in the survey received less than 100 percent of their money back.

VC-level investing
If you are a venture capitalist with a $100 million fund, you can start to look into the actual technology of the energy revolution. Thin-film solar, new battery technology, improved wind turbines and many other technologies are not quite ready for prime-time, but offer a huge upside if they hit.
Average cost: Expensive, with investment rounds averaging 10 times greater than parallel IT investments. An investment round may be $25 million to $100 million
Expected return: Very few clean-tech investment exits have happened thus far, and the investment horizon could be 10 years or longer. But the long-term potential is incredible.

More opportunities identified over at Colorado Biz.

Who reads TIME and Newsweek anymore?  Not many people I know — except my mom, who brought about three issues of the latter with her for Thanksgiving.  During the perceived junk-out — err, semi-annual research into mainstream media coverage trends — I was pretty surprised to find an article about complementary currencies titled “Small Town Currencies,” in the Crisis Watch section.

Dozens of such systems arose during the Great Depression. In the 1990s, they resurfaced as a way to fight globalization and keep wealth in local hands. Now the idea of homespun cash is back because it keeps people liquid even if they are short on traditional dollars.

The rest of the two-paragraph front-of-the-book micro-mention missed many of the core values and benefits that drive the currency movement, which is to be expected.  Imagine m surprise when I read The Transitioner’s tweet that TIME magazine had covered much the same story.

“Alternative Currencies Grow In Popularity” is a better piece of journalism, covering the history and background of the movement, and highlighting the activities of some of the more well-known systems.

Alternative means of trade often surface during tough economic times. “When money gets dried up and there are still needs to be met in society, people come up with creative ways to meet those needs,” says Peter North, a senior lecturer in geography at the University of Liverpool, author of two books on the subject. He refers to the “scrips” issued in the U.S. and Europe during the Great Depression that kept money flowing, and the massive barter exchanges involving millions of people that emerged amidst runaway inflation in Argentina in 2000.

The article does a good job of explaining the 101 of currencies, tax implications and highlights many leaders in the space, including our friends and co-conspirators Jean-Francois Noubel and Bernard Lietaer, two European thought leaders on the issue.

In recent years, the impetus for alternative currencies in established economies has stemmed in part from localization movements. Periodically ditching the dollar (or the pound, or the yen) in favor of homegrown currency doesn’t merely fortify the local economy, it also builds community: people have a stake in their neighbor’s well-being because that neighbor represents both market and supply chain. Some argue that such transactions are more secure than others because knowing the person you’re dealing with (and his family and friends) serves as a kind of social collateral.

It seems that the author has actually begun to understand the deeper impact of currency, which is where we think the general appreciation has lagged.

What’s the nuance?

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