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, [...]

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 [...]

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) [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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:

financial institutions should be sharing intellectual property. Specifically, basic risk models should be shared in a version of the creative commons, with competition [...]

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:

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 [...]

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 [...]