nuance intelligence

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.

In a move that could end up having a massive impact on US entrepreneurism, Kiva.org has introduced their peer-to-peer lending service to the US.  Kiva was originally built to alleviate poverty by creating a new capital market for global social entrepreneurs — to the US.

In their report on today’s announcement, TechCrunch reports,

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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.

One of the best articles I have found on this big, great transition we are experiencing is Hazel Henderson’s The New Financiers.  In this piece, Henderson, the founder of Ethical Markets and thought leader for a group of progressive investors and people using money as leverage for change, talks about how consciousness and social capital will balance out the ego-driven money grubbing that exemplifies Wall St, and inform a new group of leaders.

Henderson leads off her piece, “the new financiers will be the high-level information and knowledge brokers – and they will aggregate the new research on global change processes and lead in structuring the deals now creating the growing green economy.  Today information and media drive markets.”

Then she gets to the bottom of the connection, “The new deal-makers value the role of honest, well-managed currencies that remain dependable stores of value and mediums of exchange.  Money is a special kind of information, not a commodity in itself, but rather a brilliant invention of the human mind.  When backed by real-world goods and service, as well as strong contracts, money can accurately track and score human ingenuity, productivity and transactions interacting with the natural wealth of resources of our home: Planet Earth.”

I think this is probably the most eloquent description yet of the change I have been contemplating for nearly a decade.  … and that’s not even the point.  ; )

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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.

Just posted over at the Business Catapult Blog:

It’s no secret that IPOs have been at a near-standstill for the past few years.  In addition to the growing financial crisis and general gloom, the unintended consequences of the demands for more financial regulation in the wake of Enron, WorldCom and other related advantage-taking in the 90s has been a horrific hurdle to companies that want to raise equity on the open markets.

…

As attention shifts in the next administration to fostering the development of more green technologies, a healthy IPO market will be even more critical to inspiring innovation. It should also be noted that the necessary funding and interest in technology based IPOs will have a positive, derivative impact on interest in math and science education in the US, an area in which our deficit is widely acknowledged. While “DEregulation” is typically favored by pro-business constituents, given the severity of the crisis we must pursue short term “REregulation” of this important part of our economy, similar to that seen recently by the banking industry

Lots of tasty links, quotes and data to fill in the gap.