As many would agree, we are in a turbulent time. Old business models are breaking down and our future seems a bit more uncertain with each passing day. At the 10th Innovating Social Change Conference hosted last week by the Kellogg School of Management, I learned that now is the time to forget old business models and forget the past. This one-day marathon conference was led by an all-star cast of speakers and the topic of the day was “Innovation: A Catalyst for Social Change Across Sectors.” The speakers represented a variety of sectors and quite literally, a wealth of knowledge and information. I speculate that if I were to question any of the speakers at this conference on the future of business, they would answer, “social business.”
Since it might take me 5,000 words to recreate all of their great lessons I am going to try to keep this short and sweet and recap the key messages of the speakers.
John Brock, CEO, Coca-Cola Enterprises
• Socially minded leadership is the key driver of buy-in for the employee body (Coca Cola has 72,000 employees)
• Working with stakeholders (consumers, customers, suppliers, employees and non-government organizations) to innovate responsible and sustainable practices builds better relationships
• Sustainability improves business results
Conversation with John Wood, founder of Room to Read and author of Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur’s Odyssey to Educate the World’s Children, and Jonathan Greenblatt, founder of Ethos Water
“Nonprofit” is an antiquated term
• Business with a social mission is the future
• Take up a challenge, start small to see what works
• The government needs to create incentives for businesses with a social mission, quoting Jonathan, “there would be an explosion of social good”
• Don’t wait. Develop world class skills and network now. Learn to make a social impact no matter where you are in your career.
Innovating Investing Panel: Lincoln Caplan, managing partner, SeaChange Capital Partners; Greg Casagrande, founder of South Pacific Business Development Microfinance Network and MicroDreams, and founding director of the Ice Angels, Australasia’s largest angel investor group; Seth Miller, partner at DBL Investors; and Dr. Sanjay Sinho, CEO, The American India Foundation.
This panel focused on how capital markets for social good are developing. Lincoln and Sanjay represented the non-profit capital market, while Greg and Seth represented the socially minded capital market. Plenty of expertise and insight on this panel! This panel was only allotted 75 minutes, but we could have spent an entire day with them in discussion. Some of the key lessons:
• Measuring impact is a key success factor for all social capital
• Mission driven investments must be “patient capital”
• There is a broad range of businesses that do social good and it is a dynamic definition
• Invest with a double bottom line – social and financial returns
Nancy Barry, founder and CEO, Enterprise Solutions to Poverty (ESP)
• Unfettered capitalism is over and now is the time for profitable social enterprises
• The best solutions to poverty are small and local
• Started ESP to scale up local poverty solutions, or as she put it, “do it well and do it big”; social enterprises should leverage the resources of large corporations
Jacqueline Novogratz, founder of the Acumen Fund and Author of The Blue Sweater
• Created Acumen Fund after seeing a need for a better solution to poverty
• How to attack poverty: with dignity, from the bottom up, using enhanced market-based solutions
• Acumen Fund invests with “patient capital,” seeks high risk and low returns
• Invest in local social entrepreneurs, who have great products with social impact, but are ignored by commercial capital markets
Congratulations to the Northwestern Kellogg MBA students for putting together this excellent event. The cast of speakers brought the cross sector perspective that is needed in innovating social change. The future of business is the social enterprise and it is quite bright! For those who were unable to attend this conference, I hope this blog will be inspiring and informative to you, and I encourage you to try to attend KIN Global in May 2010.
-AJ Renold
Tags: Education, Social Change, Youth