Wednesday, February 22, 2012

Registration is now open for the 2012 edition of the Stonyfield Entrepreneurial Institute, a two-day “boot camp” for entrepreneurs that will feature sessions on finance, branding and social media marketing.

Presented by the Carsey Institute and the Whittemore School of Business and Economics at the University of New Hampshire, the boot camp will be held at the Grappone Conference Center in Concord on April 26and 27. New Hampshire Business Review is a media sponsor.

Speakers at the conference will include Tom First, founder of OWATER and a co-founder of Nantucket Nectars, which was sold to Cadbury Schweppes in 2002.

While building Nantucket Nectars — which was named to Inc. magazine’s list of the 500-fastest growing U.S. companies for five consecutive years — First won several awards, including the Mercury Award for Advertising and Ernst and Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year award.

First will join Gary Hirshberg, chairman of Stonyfield Farm in Londonderry and founder of the Stonyfield Institute, in sharing “Tales from the Trenches” on Thursday evening.

Also speaking at the conference will be Hirshberg’s wife, Meg Cadoux Hirshberg, an author and columnist for Inc., which is also a media sponsor.

Since 2009, she has written a column for Inc. called “Balancing Acts,” which explores work-life balance and the intersection of family and business in an entrepreneurial setting. She is also author of “For Better or For Work: A Survival Guide for Entrepreneurs and Their Families.”

The boot camp will also feature several panels, on topics such as raising early and second-stage capital, work/life balance, brand building and social media marketing.

Attendees are encouraged to submit case studies of their business challenges concerning these topics in advance of the conference. The boot camp’s final panel will present six selected case studies, and panelists will offer feedback and advice.

Panelists for the event will include Andrew Whitman, managing partner, 2X Consumer Products, Jeffrey Sohl, director of the WSBE Center for Venture Research, Howard Brodsky, CEO, CCA Global Partners, and John Hamilton, managing director, Vested for Growth, among others.

Cost of the institute is $250 and includes lunch and dinner on Thursday, and breakfast and lunch on Friday. Discounted rooms are available at the Courtyard Marriott for $102 per night.

Deadline for submitting case studies is Friday, March 30. Institute registration deadline is Monday, April 2.

For more information or to register, visit the Stonyfield Farm Entrepreneurship Institute at carseyinstitute.unh.edu/Stonyfield, or contact Susan Colucci at susan.colucci@unh.edu or 603-862-2821. — KATHLEEN CALLAHAN

Article source: http://www.nhbr.com/businessnewsstatenews/950855-257/stonyfield-boot-camp-set-for-april.html

After Brunel University announced the appointment of its first female vice-chancellor, Professor Julia Buckingham, it seems timely to write about a programme that we are running to encourage more of our female students to consider a career in business.

The programme is not necessarily about getting through the much-publicised glass ceiling – and getting women into senior roles in top companies (though there is an ongoing need there) – the focus is more on getting young women to actually think about a career in business in the first place, which even in 2012 can still be a challenge.

Women into Business, which we have launched following a successful pilot last year, is designed to raise aspirations among our female students.

There are perceptions around the so-called barriers to being a woman in business, and some are simply incorrect, so our aim is to equip our students with an approach and a series of tools and techniques that support career progression and help them overcome the genuine barriers of being a woman in a male-orientated world.

We want to inspire Brunel’s female students (and staff) to aim high and unlock their potential when it comes to their chosen career path, whether that’s in senior management or starting up their own business.

Around 50 female students have signed up to the programme, a series of workshops running in addition to their undergraduate or postgraduate studies. At Brunel our students study a whole range of subjects – arts, engineering, design, health sciences, social care, IT, computing, maths, law, social sciences, sport, education, as well as business subjects – and we’re getting a real mix of students wanting to learn from the inspirational female leaders brought in to lead the workshops.

They are learning about issues ranging from career planning, leadership, networking and image to assertiveness, negotiation, confidence-building and looking after their own reputation.

The speakers who run the workshops are very powerful women who have fought their way to the top. The message to our students is that if these women can do it, so can they. From the workshops run so far perhaps the biggest learning has been around the importance of developing networks – it’s not just what you know, it’s who you know, as they say – and having role models or mentors from a young age is important.

Understanding how men and women communicate differently has also come through strongly. Women tend to have more empathy, whereas men generally just want to cut to the chase. It’s not that men in business are necessarily ruthless, it’s just the way they communicate, and learning to adapt to that is really important for a woman.

We’ve found the students eager to learn, and at the end of the programme in March they will receive a formal certificate to mark their achievements which is a great asset on their CV when going for interviews. At Brunel we are already hot on employability, not least through the success of our award-winning Placement and Careers Centre, which picked up the prize for “university with a forward thinking attitude to work-based learning” at the National Placement and Internship awards last year.

My advice to other institutions looking to run a similar programme is simply to find what’s right for your own students. It is a case of trial and error. We started off by getting business women around the table and discussing the key issues they have had to overcome, then building up a programme of speakers and a pilot to discover what our students want. That’s been the key – ensuring that what we offer is relevant to students’ interests and ambitions.

Pauline Seston is a employability and entrepreneurship consultant at Brunel University

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Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/higher-education-network/blog/2012/feb/22/brunel-university-female-students-careers?newsfeed=true

MANILA, Philippines — An alliance of farmers, workers, community enterprises, business associations and fair trade groups is pushing for the approval of a measure designed to institutionalize social entrepreneurship (SE) nationwide.

“It is about time that we push for a bill that deals with poverty on a sustainable approach,” Dean Tony La Vina of the Ateneo School of Government (ASOG) said during a stakeholders’ meeting to launch the campaign.

The participants organized the Poverty Reduction through Social Entrepreneurship (PRESENT) Coalition after tackling the proposed Social Enterprise Bill that they want President Aquino to support.

ASOG co-convened the PRESENT Coalition with the Foundation for a Sustainable Society (FSSI.)

Social Entrepreneurship covers social mission-driven wealth creating organizations that serve the poor as primary stakeholders with at least double or triple bottom lines.

Bottom lines refer to other missions, other than profits, that respond to social and ecological values that benefit society.

Italy, United Kingdom and South Korea have legislated measures on SE.

SE began in the US in the 1970s as a response to economic downturns and cutbacks in federal funding.

On the other hand, Europe has turned to SE as a major measure in reaction to the welfare states crisis in the 1980s.

“As a field of study, SE had been studied for 20 years. SE entails innovations designed to explicitly improve societal well-being,” Lisa Dacanay of the Institute for Social Entrepreneurship in Asia (ISEA) said.

SEs in the country are comprised of about 30,000 people involved in cooperatives, community-based enterprises, microfinance institutions, small- and medium-scale industries.

They range from industries that promote organic products and agriculture-based commodities like coffee, peanuts, rice, muscovado sugar and innovative products as bamboo delicacies, specially-made furnitures and handwoven products, citronella oil, geotextiles, charcoal briquettes (from coconut shells), herbal medicines and other products.

“We are proposing an agenda for change through SE and we call on the state to play a major role in providing the necessary support to make Social Enterprise sector succeed to benefit the poor in a sustainable manner,” stressed Jay Bertram Lacsamana, FSSI executive director and co-convenor of the PRESENT Coalition.

Lacsamana explained that the Social Enterprise Bill will provide existing and potential SEs all the social rights as a legal brand and to make government play a strategic role on redistribution of wealth that the market could not play because of its own limitations.

“The capitalist drive of profit is what drives markets. If we let market economy rule the day, government cannot do its social role to ensure that the poor are economically productive,” he said.

Around 50 SE practitioners from all over the country, members of the academe and civil society organizations have united to push for the Social Enterprise Bill in a gathering at the University Hotel of the University of the Philippines in Diliman (UP-Diliman) last week.

The PRESENT Coalition, La Vina and Lacsamana explained, is supporting the Social Enterprise Bill as it aims to create a vibrant SE sector.

They added the localized economy will be vastly different from what we have now since it is a socialized economy for the poor that is characterized by sustainable employment, opportunities and other transformational changes that markets alone could not provide.

Article source: http://www.mb.com.ph/articles/352234/alliance-pushes-social-entrepreneurship-bill

VARIOUS stakeholders are pushing for the passage of a measure that seeks to promote social entrepreneurship as a tool for poverty-reduction.

The Poverty Reduction through Social Entrepreneurship (PRESENT) comprised of community enterprises, business associations, fair-trade groups, academe and civil-society organizations, is finalizing the proposed Social Enterprise Bill which they will present to President Aquino.

Social entrepreneurship (SE) is a social mission driven wealth creating organizations that serve the poor as primary stakeholders with at least double or triple bottom lines. Bottom lines refer to other missions, other than profits, that respond to social and ecological values that benefits society or communities.

Tony La Vina, dean of the Ateneo School of Government (Asog), said the proposed measure is timely, as it deals with poverty on a “sustainable approach.”

 Asog co-convenes the PRESENT coalition with the Foundation for a Sustainable Society.

Only countries such as Italy, the United Kingdom and South Korea have legislated measures on social entrepreneurship.

SE has begun in the 70s in the US as a response to economic downturns and cutbacks in federal funding, while Europe has turned to SE as a major measure to the ’80s welfare states crisis.

“As a field of study, SE had been studied for 20 years. SE entails innovations designed to explicitly improve societal well-being,” Lisa Dacanay of the Institute for Social Entrepreneurship in Asia said.

 SEs in the country remain a cross-sector of about 30,000 that include cooperatives, community-based enterprises, microfinance institutions, small and medium scale industries.

They range from industries that promote organic products and agriculture-based commodities such as coffee, peanuts, rice, muscovado sugar and other innovative products such as bamboo delicacies, specially made furnitures and handwoven products, citronella oil, geotextiles, charcoal briquettes (from coconut shells), herbal medicines and other products.

“We are proposing an agenda for change through social entrepreneurship and we call on the State to play a major role in providing the necessary support to make social enterprise sector succeed to benefit the poor in a sustainable manner,” Jay Bertram Lacsama, FSSI executive director and co-convenor of the PRESENT Coalition stated.

Lacsamana further explained that the social enterprise bill will provide existing and potential SEs all the social rights as a legal brand and to make government play a strategic role on redistribution of wealth that the market could not play because of its own limitations.

“The capitalist drive of profit is what drives markets. If we let market economy rule the day, the government cannot do its social role to ensure that the poor are economically productive,” he stated.

Around 50 social enterprise practitioners from all over the country, members of academe and civil-society organizations have united to push for the Social Enterprise Bill in a gathering at the University of the Philippines (UP) University Hotel last week.  

Article source: http://businessmirror.com.ph/home/economy/23573-social-entrepreneur-bill-pushed-to-fight-poverty

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On the day Steve Jobs died last fall, Occupy Wall Street organized the first massive march down though the Canyon of Heroes in New York, in the opposite direction of the route the New York Giants would take four months later. Swollen by busloads of stoic union troops, the small and somewhat ragged OWS band melded with a much larger crowd and dominated lower Manhattan from Foley Square to Trinity Church, a patch of turf Washington and Hamilton would surely still recognize for its geographic and economic centrality to the nation, if not for the shadows of the modern buildings and mounted police officers in riot gear.That news of Apple‘s existential loss should break just as the Occupiers broke out of Mayor Bloomberg’s pens for the first time brought on a wave of horizontal vertigo to those who consider citizens movements and corporate visionaries to (sometimes) be benevolent actors on the stage of the same large tent.

The juxtaposition of Jobs’ death and the mosaic citizens march I’d just witnessed was so obvious, so seemingly contrived as to seem like a screenwriter’s wastebasket filler. There was CNBC announcing the death of America’s most successful (and indeed, truly beloved) capitalist, the man most responsible for an explosion in portable digital entertainment, just as the most successful anti-corporate branding campaign of our lifetimes took hold. Months later, as I delve into Jobs’ biography via Walter Isaacson, I can’t help but think of the younger man who once proclaimed: “It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.”

Jobs became admiral of the largest navy on the global ocean, a task that led Apple into the scandal over Foxconn and Apple’s outsourcing of industrial misery in service of speed and and scale and price. The slave-galley drones of Jay Chiat’s brilliant ’1984′ Apple Super Bowl ad about challenging the status quo now toil overseas as sub-contractors for the world’s largest company.

Yet Steve Jobs, it seems to me, started out as a social entrepreneur of rare talent. His goal was not money or power, but change. And I think his drive to create products of beauty and utility had discernable social goals, beyond any bottom line or quarterly analyst’s report. They had nothing to do with either profit or serving shareholders, those twin shibboleths of capitalist motivation. He died a billionaire but may have had more in common with the pirates marching on Wall Street last fall, for they’re social entrepreneurs as well.

Occupy Wall Street was a start-up. And it was deeply entrepreneurial. Indeed, if any venture capitalists are looking for proven talent in attracting a crowd online behind a product that is lithe, broad, and ripe for vast adoption, they could do worse than pick up some talent from those who built Brand Occupy and changed the political discourse of a nation stuck in neutral. “Nobody had talked about income inequality in America for decades – apart from John Edwards – but no one was listening,” Bruce Springsteen told a press conference on his new record this week .”But now you have Newt Gingrich talking about ‘vulture capitalism’ – Newt Gingrich! – that would not have happened without Occupy Wall Street.”

Marketing genius to be sure. But the bootstrapping angle is just as important. The effort, the drive, the making do, the routing around, the bouncing back when knocked down – all that matters. In truth, the Occupiers steer much closer to the idealistic self-improving America of Ralph Waldo Emerson than the largest multinational conglomerates. And their goal – loosely defined, decentralized and (you heard it here first) primed to make a big comeback this spring – in entirely social.

To me, those are the far outer edges of what I’d like to define as “social ventures,” the broad topic for this new Forbes column – the largest corporation and the  ”leaderless” street movement. Steve Jobs and Occupy Wall Street. Social entrepreneurship is about talented energetic risk-takers with an undeniable urge to scratch a society itch. Sure, it’s Muhammad Yunus and Fazel Abed and Bill Drayton and the good folks at Skoll and Ashoka. It’s the tenacious online pioneers like Kiva, DonorsChoose, GlobalGiving, Change.org and their many committed cousins. Blended entities and companies pledged to doing good with their profits. Charities with new models for old problems. Dark side challenges to the comfort of secrecy from Anonymous and Wikileaks. The reinvention of government through open data and new platforms. The 1,800 young people who every year attend the university-oriented version of the Clinton Global Initiative and make a commitment on a project for change. The thousands more in the scores of programs in philanthropy and social entrepreneurship that have sprouted like seedlings on the farms of higher education over the past decade.

And the individual dreamers. Those who see something they don’t like, and try to change it – or something they do like, and try to nurture it. Steve Jobs was right in end, even if the company he built drifted from his vision. It is more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy. I’m not here to cheerlead or push the utopian vision of a broad sunlit upland lit by companies with double bottom lines. I’m here to question and start a conversation. So mateys, let’s make sail.

Article source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/tomwatson/2012/02/21/who-are-the-social-entrepreneurs/

There is something happening which is long overdue yet incredibly exciting. Academia is tackling reality. Disruption in higher education is getting sexy, and it’s going to change the world.

Social entrepreneurship, the often practitioner-focused undertaking of merging meaning and money, has caught the eye of countless universities around the world. Over 50 have opened centers for social entrepreneurship, including, most recently, Middlebury College. Others have already established themselves at the forefront of the space: Arizona State University, Tulane, University of the Pacific and the New School name a few.

What is the force moving this mountain? After all, universities are decentralized, lumbering bureaucracies that don’t exactly embrace monolithic approaches to anything, especially if it is primarily focused on practical application.

A team from Ashoka U, a division of Ashoka, the institution that popularized the term “Social Entrepreneurship” through their Fellowships, has managed to make disruption in higher education more than an idea. Today it is a reality.

Ashoka U, led by Marina Kim and Erin Krampetz, proposes a challenge: How might we build a movement of universities and advance social entrepreneurship thinking to become part of the DNA of the modern university?

The answer: a focused approach. Engage your audience from the top and bring them together to build the momentum. Engagement at the top was on remarkable display in Tempe, Ariz. a week ago, when the presidents of three major universities proclaimed — emphatically — that social entrepreneurship was core to their mission.

Those university presidents from Tulane, ASU and Babson, were speaking to an audience of 450 people who had gathered for the Ashoka U Exchange, a conference on disruption in higher education. One hundred universities had sent representatives to attend the conference.

At the conclusion of the Exchange, Ashoka U presented the Cordes Innovation Awards for best practices in social enterprise education. The constant push for higher impact and better institutions describes the remarkable energy that consumes the attendee. That night ThinkImpact’s Innovation Institute was fortunate to be among the recognized innovations. The Innovation Institute is an eight-week summer immersion program where scholars across the country live and study social entrepreneurship in rural Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda or South Africa. Through a field-tested curriculum and experience with local community members, scholars explore new thinking on poverty and international development, create business solutions to challenges in emerging economies and launch ideas connecting education to the real world. The program is one-of-a-kind, and brings together multi-disciplinary backgrounds to propel students to be leaders in collaboration and sustainable impact.

The work to build an ecosystem of universities actively engaging in the world of social entrepreneurship is still in its infancy, but it is not insignificant. Indeed, it is raging forward. Ashoka U seeks to establish a community that changes the world. It already has. And the work has only just begun.

Want to submit an idea for impact and continue the momentum? Visit Ashoka U’s Good Maker challenge and get involved today!

Follow Saul Garlick on Twitter:

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Article source: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/saul-garlick/an-ecosystem-for-innovati_b_1288759.html