nuance intelligence

Friend, advisor, sustainable investing activist and “our hero,” Jed Emerson (who is more of a Charles Barkley “I am not a role model” kind of hero) just published a piece in Forbes that  points to some trends that would startle the traditional investing community.

The little secret of this past year’s capital crisis is that while many mainstream investments incurred significant losses in value, one category remained steady–with some investors significantly outperforming the mainstream market. It’s called impact investing.  Impact investing covers that category of investment, which is viewed as “sustainable,” generating financial returns by integrating consideration of social and environmental factors into the investment strategy.

Emerson raises some little-known facts, including:

• the impact investing sector is now a $2.71 trillion industry. (where do we go to get that money, again???)
• micro finance provide a 6% return to investors, while traditional instruments were DOWN 3-5 times that much.

Alongside other recent reports in mainstream financial media, Jed’s piece in Forbes makes us think people are paying more and more attention to this sector.

Colorado State University has an incredible program within the Business School — Global Social and Sustainable Enterprise — that “seeks to provide sustainable enterprise solutions to some of the most stubborn issues of our time including poverty, disease, malnutrition and environmental degradation… [equipping students] with the tools and network to become a global social entrepreneur, where the bottom lines are people, planet and profit.  This concentration is in the business of creating a better world, improving the lives of people, while building profitable ventures.”

One of many laudable aspects of the program is the 50/50 ratio of US and domestic students in each cohort.  As we learned recently at their annual kickoff celebration — hosted at sustainable business paragon New Belgium Brewery, this translates into teams with experience on multiple continents, often boasting 10 languages spoken on an individual project.

Six prospective companies presented their plans as the program’s second cohort.  We expect one or two of these to become strong companies after graduation, if not before.  Here are very brief summaries of the concepts: Continue reading

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.

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

Don Tapscott, futurist and author of Wikinomics, posted a two-minute video (tip: Kevin Johansen) suggest that it’s time to shift how we think about financial risk.  His proposal is based on two concepts:

1. financial institutions should be sharing intellectual property. Specifically, basic risk models should be shared in a version of the creative commons, with competition happening above and beyond the basic models.
2. financial institutions should be peering, ie acting together to reinvent their industry.

As readers of Wikinomics know, this is consistent with Tapscott’s position that information and Open Source thinking change business. He positions this within the context of a failed financial system based on closed and proprietary thinking, suggesting that a more collaborative method of risk analysis would create a more stable, and ultimately stronger market.

As nuance readers know, at Business Catapult, we have been working on an evolution of risk management that takes into account sustainability thinking and triple-bottom-line metrics.

As we anticipate the upcoming Social Capital Markets (SoCap) conference (who just hosted the first of three conference-related twitter chats this week), we wonder how our fellow conference goers (and anyone else concerned about the social captial markets) think about Tapscott’s proposition, and how the social capital marketplace could take his advice.

We’ll be blogging deeper thoughts later, but tune in to the live twitter feed at #sixlisbon on Twitter.  Lots of great collaboration from 100 leaders in 24 countries.

Fascinating work continues at nuance partners Innovation Network for Communities (INC) and the nuPOLIS blogsite, newsfeed and shared information resource focusing on scalable social innovations for communities.  Please review and enjoy this update put together for the people who are just getting to know our work: 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