nuance intelligence

Reminder: Join the meetup tonight.

Here’s a summary of what to expect, straight from the Meetup description: Continue reading

Our friends and collaborators Peter van Geldern and David Marks have re-launched their Shades of Green Network (SGN) this week.  SGN is a network of advisors and investors who are focusing on building green businesses in the New York metro area.  Their network has professionals of all disciplines (accountants, lawyers, grant writers, marketers and more), and engagement begins with a gap analysis that helps early-stage entrepreneurs figure out their next steps on the path to a sustainable enterprise.  Once a business is ready, SGN has an investor network with venture capitalists, angel investors and other forms of private equity. Continue reading

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.

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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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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