Friday round-up: Gates, Cotton, Black, and Schwartz.

Few more items to round-up from another exciting week in the world of social entrepreneurship….

– I’d been meaning to blog about the Economist’s supplement on CSR this week (which I’ll try and come back to), but then it was superseded by this piece on social entrepreneurs. Well worth a read: related, as it is, to the Schwab forum in Davos about the movement, and to the book Pamela Hartigan and John Elkington have written on the subject: The Power of Unreasonable People.

SSE were represented in Zurich (not by this blog, sadly :0) ), and were happy to see Ann Cotton, SSE Fellow, get one of Schwab’s five World Social Entrepreneur awards. Congratulations to Ann and, as she would say, the entire team at CAMFED. Read more here.

– At the big daddy version of Davos (the World Economic Forum), the big news was Bill Gates talking about his concept of ‘creative capitalism’; you can read the whole article in the Wall Street Journal: my summary version is "companies should create businesses that focus on building products and services for the poor, thinking innovatively about the poorest and bottom billion".

– Closer to home, we must report that Liam Black, one of the foremost social entrepreneurs of his generation, has left Fifteen. Non-acrimonious according to reports, and the sector will no doubt be paying attention to what he does next: a book and a new business idea are on the horizon….

– Rod Schwartz has a good post about corporates and ethical purchasing on the Catalyst Fund Blog.

– Somehow, I missed this before: the first Office of Social Entrepreneurship opens in the US, in Louisiana. See also "America Forward", pushing the movement to the various presidential candidates…

– Voice 08, I think I mentioned before….looking like it will be the biggest and (hopefully) the best Voice conference so far. See if you can spot the Coalition’s promotion of it on their website ;0) SSE will be well represented, including our Liverpool SSE staff and students….hope to see some of you there.

CAN Mezzanines have got their 100th customer, and a potential fourth venue…congrats all round

– Scotland has mirrored England’s Office of the Third Sector by merging its charities and social enterprise teams. It made sense here…I think it makes sense there too.

– The OTS themselves are seeking organisations who’ve actually used a Social Return On Investment methodology to measure their impact. See here for more details and who to contact.

– SSE welcomes all the Ambassadors next week, and we’ll blog about all of that and how it goes: an amazing bunch of people to bring together….

– And finally, this made me chuckle: for those of you with little desk space; the collapsible home office

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One thought on “Friday round-up: Gates, Cotton, Black, and Schwartz.

  1. Social enterprise – irrational exuberance?

    Irrational exuberance – Alan Greenspan’s famous phrase about the 1990’s stock market boom – has cropped up again recently amidst all the worries about the state of the financial markets. A few things recently have got me thinking that there