Where to Look for Good Venture Ideas

By Rolfe Larson on May 11, 2010

It’s not hard thinking up venture ideas. Often they seem to come out of the woodwork. Get some folks together for an hour and you’ll come out with a couple dozen of them. Include some entrepreneurial people from outside your group and you’ll get some new ideas that you might have missed. But also step […]

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Is the "Social" In Social Enterprise Redundant?

By Rolfe Larson on May 5, 2010

Do we still need a “social” enterprise sector? Many businesses have “social impact” at least with their customers. And these customers around the world are demanding greater accountability and environmental sensitivity. Here’s what a reader to this blog wrote last week. “The underlying distinction made between social and business enterprise is thin,” noted Ashim Kumar […]

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View From the Summit

By Rolfe Larson on May 2, 2010

I just returned from the 11th Social Enterprise Alliance Summit+ World Forum in San Francisco. A record 700+ attendees from around the world attest to the growing strength of this vibrant sector. I met folks from Canada, the UK, Australia, the Philippines, Africa, and South America. In an earlier blog I described social enterprise as […]

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Social Enterprise Summit + World Forum Opens Tomorrow

By Rolfe Larson on April 27, 2010

Tomorrow is the first day of the Social Enterprise Alliance’s annual Summit, a national conference that features a wide variety of presentations, workshops and networking in this field.  This year’s Summit is being held in San Francisco.  More information is available at www.se-alliance.org. If you can make it to the conference, great, I know you […]

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The Trillion Dollar Social Enterprise Sector

By Rolfe Larson on April 26, 2010

Many social enterprises in the US come from the nonprofit sector, and a common way to measure nonprofit social enterprise is through earned income. Generally earned income refers to selling goods or services in exchange for a quid pro quo payment.  In other words, you only get paid if you deliver the goods. Based on […]

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Running On Empty

By Rolfe Larson on April 22, 2010

Way too many social enterprises are way too undercapitalized. They don’t have the cash on hand to make rational spending decisions on staffing, inventory, professional expertise, marketing, and so on,  to grow their venture. Their tendency is not only to go cheap, but to go without for things they desperately need to turn their social […]

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Separating Social from Business Costs

By Rolfe Larson on April 15, 2010

The best information on this topic comes from a recent discussion at the npEnterprise Forum, the 7000-subscriber official listserv partner of the Social Enterprise Alliance. From Esther Kim: “Our basic rule of thumb is that: * it’s a social cost if it’s incurred to accomplish a social mission; * it’s a business cost if it’s […]

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Certainly Not Business As Usual

By Rolfe Larson on April 13, 2010

To quote Monty Python: And now, for something completely different… In a sense, they could be talking about social enterprise. For many folks, this represents a whole new way of looking at the world, requiring new skills and new perspectives. Experienced nonprofit people are facing the marketplace of competition and risk taking in ways they […]

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Risky Business

By Rolfe Larson on April 8, 2010

There’s just no way to avoid it. You might fail with your social enterprise.  Lose your shirt.  Wish you’d never started it. There’s no safety net for social enterprise, and there never will be. The U.S. Census Bureau reports that half of business startups with employees are gone five years later. Social enterprises probably do […]

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Mission Impact: The One Bottom Line

By Rolfe Larson on April 5, 2010

For centuries there was only one bottom line: profitability. Then people and companies interested in making the world a better place, not just making money, decided social impact should have equal billing.  Fair enough.  A bit later, environmental impact demanded a place at the table, so now we have three bottom lines.  And from that […]

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