nuance intelligence

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.

Continue reading

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.

If you can forgive me the conceit of talking about myself for a second (not my favorite trait in bloggers), I’ve been a pretty sporadic blogger this year.  A mix of moderately heavy consulting work, reading and thinking about the epochal transition, and an extended experiment with Twitter have kept me from pouring much into the nuance intelligence blog bucket.

There’s an ever-evolving blog post I’m writing called “The New Normal” that starts, “A system that values and compensates an individual’s contribution to their community will replace the “greed is good” ethic that allowed Wall St. to dominate our world for the past 30 years.”  Seems simple enough, but the natural evolution from that concept indicates a fundamental transition in our relationship to economics, natural resources, other people, and — for the most part — how we live our lives. In fact, I believe that we are — consciously or not — re-writing the basic Social Contract that ties us together as humanity.

Continue reading

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.

Wow.  There have been many “I never thought I would read about that” moments this year, but to read an article on the BBC about the concept that banks could offer negative interest makes me wonder if the apocalypse really is upon us.  Also called demurrage, negative interest is a carrying charge, and one that people might pay if they think their money is really at risk.

From the BBC:

Justin Urquhart Stewart, director of Seven Investment Management, says rates have been negative before.

“It does sound very strange, but it has happened in the past.

“If you go back more than 20 years to Switzerland, people were so worried about the value of currencies that they were running to anything they saw as a safe currency and the Swiss franc was it.

“So overseas investors had to pay for the privilege of holding Swiss francs – a negative interest rate.”

But that’s just the beginning.  Another effect of demurrage is that it encourages spending, because your money will be worth less tomorrow than it is today.  Of course, you ought to be spending money on something that will be of greater value tomorrow than it is today.

What’s the nuance?

In the BBC piece, the “rational” economists and bankers say that it won’t happen, despite the examples to the contrary, but the very fact that the article was not laughed out of the newsroom points to an incredible shift in what’s possible.

As we wrote just last month, innovative money, currency and exchange systems are getting more and more attention these days.   Innovative money systems are not so distant anymore.

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.

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?

Continue reading