You may want to check out the building we have constructed in Second Life, the virtual reality space with millions of members. We plan to rent space to the Green Festival companies and create the first online, three-dimensional eco-mall.

http://www.globalcitizencenter.org/content/view/32/2/

Unless you have a workable cross border legal and financial structure or "enterprise model" you will have difficulty "scaling" anything, I think.

And you'll need to look again at financing in the developing world. The current financing tools of "Equity" in joint stock corporations and Debt are essentially designed to vacuum value out of developing nations.

I find it difficult to take micro-credit - and its premise that the way to bring people out of poverty is to put them into debt - seriously.

A partnership-based approach to investment is certainly necessary. But I am afraid most people I have seen in this area wouldn't know a partnership if it bit them on the ankle.

They talk collaboration, but structurally find this virtually impossible to achieve...

Chris

Point 1:

Cross border legal and financial structures are already happening within the EU and other areas, but it is costly +- 30/50 000 Euros per annum. It was designed for High-networth individuals and global corporations. We are using the same legal process in Empowerment Gateway albeit we are a social entreprise. It required some creative thinking and process application design ... but then that is what engineers do!

What is needed is lobbying to make those legal structures more affordable and within the grasp of social entreprises.

Point e: Financing

Again, there are various initiatives around the world lokking at "social finance mechanisms" ... including an organisation in Germany with branches in the UK that is looking at creating a "Paralel stock market programme" still in its infancy ... but with lots of potential to succeed.

In South Africa the concept of equity broadbasing is a great one (although it is being abuse currently for self-enrichment) ... notwitsnading that, the concept is brilliant ... we need to find the platforms and tools and legal structures to leverage it.

Again, within Empowerment Gateway we believe that we have done so ... we are using a combination of legal platforms instead of one single platform. Again this comes at a price, and is a costly process however the net benefits far outway the costs.

Re your point 3 - My pet subject.

The old paradigm that a credit line is an asset is the biggest load of crap ever created. Micro-credit has a place, but it must not be used as the one and only methodology. Instead bartering, and cash-trading also has a place as well as other creative funding mechanisms. This is a subject on its own and I could talk for a year on it.

Your point 4: Partnerships

Go back to nature. The human body is the perfect example of collaborative interdepent partnership. Each organ functions on its own, but each organ cannot survive on its own. There is alot that one can learn from nature. If you follow the same basic interdependancy and collaboration framework in business or social entreprises ... you will in the end have designed a body ... such as the human body without cloning.

At the end of the day, the way of business for business sake is on the way out and being replaced by a new SE.

Laurinda Seabra

Jeff I like your topic ... and talk about syncronicity.

We have spent the most part of this year identifying potential strategic and alliance partners and you are correct when you state that it is not a "brokerage" but rather "production" approach that one must follow. All your comments are valid and practical in nature ... which is what is needed as a starting point.

My comments on process using a blended process, which includes finance, technology, human capital.

Pilot:

1. Start by quantifying your purpose. 2. Look for mutual synergies. 3. Package the mutual synergies into Win-Win packages. 4. Invite Expressions of Interest from parties. 5. Negotiate and enter into pilot agreements to test process. 6. Cooperate to reach mutual synergies. 7. Appoint project champions on all sides. 8. Monitor and take corrective action when needed 9. Deliver 10. Quantify stakeholder benefitiation.

After pilot:

1. Quantify pilot results. 2. Enter into 3/5 year contracts. 3. Quantify outcomes. 4. Monitor 5. Report

We are now launching the pilot programme, after spnding the past year designing the structural process and collaboraitive interfaces.

I shall keep you posted on progress.

Take care

Laurinda Seabra

Jeff- Thanks for hosting this session. Some good thoughts (not surprising). 1) Design. Not just the product. The organization (hybrids, etc.)and the ecosystem. Think like a hacker. Impact comes from figuring out how to flip the system and getting it to start changing itself. For inspiration, look at Fast Company Social Capitalists, TechAward Laureates, etc. 2) Michael Porter's article on Strategy and Society (Harv Bus Review Dec 2006) points out the need for more strategic partnerships between .coms and .orgs and suggests a way for the .coms to find strategic partners. I'd urge .orgs to look at it from the opposite direction. Who is a good strategic .com partner? The answer does not have a $ sign in the answer, and not everyone can hit up Google, so get creative. And, since I don't work at Harvard or make my living as a consultant, I can suggest that some of these partners may not even be members of the Fortune 100. 3) Movie production is a great analogy for entrepreneurs. Band together, make something, disband. Of course, in our world, the disbanding is hard because we aren't always being asked to take another $10 million job in Italy. Sure, some efforts deserve a "Built to Last" approach, but some can be more short term hook ups. I'd speculate that these are more likely to be more virtual projects (moving data and electrons) than physical (making pumps or food). But what do I know. 4) So the last time I saw you, you were on a panel on microfranchising. Where does that come in? Or is it not radical enough? ;-) As with all areas of entrepreneurship, ideas are cheap, execution dear. And distribution is what kills so many businesses. So radical collaboration needs to also include the more prosaic issue of getting your product to the user/customer. Bill Easterly's comparison of the world's ability to rapidly distribute Harry Potter but not 12 cent malaria medicine should be required reading for all wanting to get radical. Hugs, Paul

Thanks for sharing the Stategy & Society article. I downloaded it and read it today. It has a lot of meaning to me because it describes the type of business/non profit partnerships that I describe at http://cmapspublic.ihmc.us/servlet/SBReadResourceServlet?rid=1178301962705_378512451_14531&partName=htmltext

My aim is to collect and organize information and provide tools that help teams from business and social sector understand issues of shared importance, and make decisions to prioritize strategic, and long-term involvement.

Do you know of any web site where case histories such as the example of GE's involvement with schools, are being collected and hosted? Or where similar articles such as Strategy & Society are being archieved?

Three sentences -

1)Collaboration is the key/basic operational methodology for to move on. 2)Strategic or rational or logical-the purpose is we don't want the idea to die or have natural death. 3)People are the stakeholders and for their dream of having ideal society - where we have access to safe water & food,shelter,ability to face uncertainties - are to be made reality by the claimers.

Fantastic dialogue indeed and HAPPY NEW YEAR & MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ONE & ALL.

-Surya Prakash Vinjamuri.

I use the word collaboration often, but don't mean a formal, documented partnership, but rather a series of purpose-driven interactions between my organization and others who share the same purpose, and do something to help each other at differnet stages in the time line from starting a project and achieving the goal of the project.

The attached pdf it titled "building a network of purpose" http://www.tutormentorexchange.net/Partner/CC/Presentations/collaboration/Building%20a%20Network%20Focused%20on%20a%20Common%20Goala.pdf

I apply many of the concepts listed in your six steps to share my ideas and goals with others, who may use them as they please, and who at different times may volunteer time, talent or dollars to help me achieve these goals.

In the pdf I show an inverted pyramid, with my organization on the bottom, providing information and leading actions that support the involvement of many other organizations and individuals who seek the same long-term goals. This is a virtual organization which seeks many owners and leaders show have some stake in the outcome.

By working this way I retain a flexiblility to respond to needs and opportunities, while I find help from many different resources at different times. The weakness is that this is not a formal form of collaboartion, and thus its more difficult to find investors and consistent funding.

I think the key to success is that the innovator or leader has a clear purpose, is able to constantly communicate that purpose to a wide range of people, and understands the many different ways others from business and non profits can help in different ways at different times.

It works for me. I'll be entering my 16th year in January.

So within very few comments we have already stretched out across a whole variety of key issues for radical collaboration;

1. Kevin - your explorations of virtual collaborative formats is key - we have been looking at the information tools and services that would need to support a collaborarium (what we are calling our collaborative platform) - for now, mostly at connective data issues and visualization opportunities to help people identify each other - there is some thinking to be done around how you move between the virtual transaction of information and the difficult business of building relationships; can you imagine what it would take to create a scenario where a social investor would buy into a company or NGO online without having even met them?

BTW - check out the Bali conference on second life.

1. Chris and Laurinda (and just about everyone else): both of you touch on a key issue for us in the Collaboratorium concept - you need to bring the right people together around an opportunity but just as importantly you have to bring them together in the right way; this ranges from

Formal Business Structure: Coming in from the outset around a formal MOU structure - moving through to JV's and clearly defined legal partnership structures etc.

Legal Structuring: Paul mentions organizational structure - this is one of those key decision points as organizations seek to understand how best to solve a problem - you need to have legal council on hand in to move from conversation to something concrete; from hybrids to understanding how and where for profits and NGO's can relate to each other legally.

I hosted a talk on this subject a while back on Social Edge...

Financial Structuring: essentially how capital flows in a collaboration - both in terms of what is legal but also in terms of what keeps the system sustainable over time.

Laurinda and Paul you both touch on micro finance issues; we're doing some thinking around this for a Collab in Kenya and what is emerging for us and our partners is the need for a capital layer cake to be able to engage with opportunities effectively; this would include a access to debt (macro and micro), equity (soft and hard), risk financing (wrappers) and insurance... So yes I agree, micro finance is key at the sharp end of deals in emerging markets but NOT the only piece of the puzzle.

Check out Wim Van der Beeks work with Goodwell Avishkar fund - micro finance, micro venture and a variety of micro insurance poducts.

1. Surya: The role of community and needs of those creating their own futures is a critical point - using design thinking and engaging from an ethnographic perspective as well as talking to partners being served lies at the heart of making any collaboration work - to Paul's point - if it isn't a need it doesn't even have a chance of getting to market...

Vandana shiva did some fascinating work in this area around the work being done by HLL

1. Daniel - Networks of purpose is a fascinating framework when applied to broad concepts - how effective in your experience have they been in dealing with very specific deals - from your comments they break down somewhat at the formal partnership level which would suggest that they line up as a tool to find opportunities for more specific collaborations...

Paul mentioned a Harvard Business Review article titled "Strategy & Society" in his post. I read it today and commented above. In the introduction of the article, the writer says "The prevailing approaches to Corporate Social Responsibility are so fragmented and so disconnected from business and strategy as to obscure many of the greatest opportunities for companies to benefit society."

In my mission statement my first goal is to collect and organize information other people can use to understand the issues of poverty, and the ways volunteer-based tutor/mentor programs can be part of a strategy to keep kids in school and headed to careers. Part of the information we want to find would be examples of companies who have applied the thinking of the Strategy & Society article into their CRS strategies. I've not found many that do this well, which means I've not many specific deals that I could point to.

However, I'm not really looking for formal deals at this stage. I'm looking for connections being made between business and non profit tutor/mentor programs, and I'm trying to build a comprehensive database that shows all of the various organizations in Chicago who offer some sort of tutoring/mentoring, and get these organizations to begin to share information with each other, and collaborate with each other, and the T/MC, to engage business more strategically.

In this there are numerous examples of other people working in big or small ways with my organization, or each other, in actions that range from a single interaction, to interactions that last for many years.

One of the best examples of business involvement is a gowing program in the Chicago legal community, called the SunTimes Judge Marovitz Lawyers Lending a Hand to Youth Program (http://www.lend-a-hand.net). Between 1995 and 2006 this group raised and awarded about $500,000 in total grants to 30-40 different tutor/mentor programs in Chicago. In Nov. 06 they received a $2 million award, so the grant pool in 2007 and for the next 10 years will be at least $200,000 per year. That's an example of they type of business ownership we seek to encourage in businesses throughout Chicago and in other cities.

By sharing this information here and on our web sites, I hope we inspire legal communities and social networks in every major city with a Bar Association to duplicate what they are doing in Chicago. If I can collect information about what lawyers do in other cities each year, I can use it to help the lawyers in Chicago improve what they do every year.

Thus, if we collect and organizate effective modles of corporate CSR, organized by country, city, cause, type of business, we provide knowledge that many can use in many place.

Jeff- Do you have examples you can share from the Collaboratorium? Can you tell us more about Kenya?

Daniel- I know of no "single source" of articles/examples of .com/.org link ups. Stanford Social Innovation Review and Fast Company are fairly fertile sources of what is going on out there. But as for sources from outside US, perhaps others can give ideas? The GRI reports for .coms will report out on some initiatives, but often hard to get a sense of whether these will be long lived.

Happy Holidays, Paul

Jeff,

You and I have spent many an hour discussing this, but I would like to raise this point:

The Collaboratorium sounds and feels like an Incubator, the likes of which we see all over the place. The Santa Clara Global Social Benefit Incubator, Plug and Play Tech Center, even the Tech Museum Awards - these all have some type of incubation component, and are a response to the widespread dearth of support for the more radical ideas that are out there.

What makes the Collaboratorium different? An equity stake is fine so long as the businesses succeed (and have solid business models behind them), but how to create a truly risk-friendly environment, from soup (the gung-ho Collaboratorium participants willing to take a financial hit in the name of progress), to nuts (the funders who want a return, if even a low one)?

Is the Collaboratorium doomed to feature only the creme-de-la-creme of forward-looking productions, without bringing more conventional business into the fold?

(I personally think this is just fine, but want your thoughts!)

Laurinda

Looks like you and I are singing from the same song book.

I came at this from a financial background: I used to be a Director of the International Petroleum Exchange, for what that's worth...

Although I still do a bit of market stuff - the infamous "Iran Oil Bourse" was my idea for instance - I have been working with a Scottish charity these last couple of years - with some funding from the Norwegian government -to develop new partnership-based enterprise models and financial tools, particularly for micro finance.

A workable cross-border legal structure - and I've done it - costs no more than £20.00 to set up using a UK Limited Liability Partnership as a framework. Sure it's a bit more to develop, but that depends on how prescriptive the members need the cross border legal protocol/LLP agreement to be.

The most exciting thing for me is the fact that the use of LLP's and LLC's opens up entirely new asset classes of units of production and/or revenues arising out of these "partnerships".

Quite revolutionary, IMHO

You can find some background on my site www.opencapital.net, which is getting a bit tired these days but still relevant.

Best Regards

Chris Cook

PS you can drop me an email at cojock(at) hotmail.com

Hi Jeff et al,

I absolutely agree that there is a significant need for a collaboration platform/network/system using which companies, organizations, entrepreneurs, etc. may work together to impact the world and society in positive ways. Rather than depend on our own limited networks and relationships, we could then maximize our impacts by selecting parters by ability and resources, rather than proximity or convenience.

In order for it to work, at least in my narrow perspective, the focus has to be on execution, not just ideation, and collaboration. In most cases, it doesn't matter who you have in the room unless you have a driver there who will play the role of the symphony's conductor, weaving the individual voices and talents of her symphony together to create indescribable music, or in our case, social impact. This role usually follows the entrepreneur, or she who conceives of the opportunity. Everyone else is there simply to either make money and/or be part of something that will impact the world in positive ways, and because they have faith that it will actually happen, and they they aren't wasting their time. In all that I have seen in my short life, I've certainly found that talk is cheap. Everyone talks. Few jump. And I personally only want to collaborate with people who have the guts to follow through to execution.

Thoughts?

An example of something that seems to be working, in case you haven't yet seen it, from a purely entrepreneurial perspective:

http://www.xobni.com/asmith/archives/15

(blog post is from a Y Combinator [http://ycombinator.com/] startup founder)

Sure, this is related to for-profit business, not social impact opportunity, and Y Combinator is acting as a seed stage investor... but read closer from the entrepreneur's perspective, he didn't do it for the investment, that was just the price he paid to get access to people and resources to strengthen his approach in addressing the opportunity he saw.

I've read this thread many times, feeling a need to participate and comment but hardly knowing where to start. So, let's begin with the assertion that profit and social benefit aren't mutually exclusive, with which I totally agree.

For us, perhaps the first radical step was to engage with government, with a founder's pitch to a President describing a formal model for a social benefit business. With a business plan and this model it was then possible to invest $4000 to make the case for a development project which brought in a microcredit bank with an ultimate investment of $10 million, 10,000 new businesses and full cost recovery.

It's for this reason, although I'm a fan of what Chris Cook describes above in the LLP based investment model, that we need to make the case for microcredit, of which there are variants, some more effective than others. If we want to scale up, while there is no collaboration we need to base what we do on proven concepts. What had been proven was that with small investment, one might leverage government backing many times this cost to draw USAID and Finca together as partners with the government of a host country.

For us, in so many ways it has to be this way due to the absence of collaboration. Some organisations are prohibited by the regulations that bind them from supporting our politically based advocacy. Some misinterpret it. We've been described occasionally as fraudsters, communists and lunatics. For our man in the field it has meant treading on dangerous territory, speaking out where some think it wiser to just do what one can.

For me the core issue of non-collaboration is most obvious in how we support our work, selling software to UK government and corporations who need make no more commitment than pay their bills. Many don't, while at the same time proclaiming their CSR credentials and social engagement.

Now an important point about social business was from the start to build a model which would co-exist in the free market system, so from this perspective I don't see there's a real need for a social stockmarket, since most of us need only access to seed funding where our model of incorporation may make a start-up loan near impossible. Perhaps I misunderstand this social stock market, as what I've seen is little more than the title. Chris Cook I know makes the point that a model based on an the outdated concept of stock is rendered redundant by asset sharing investment models. I tend to agree, with the rider that in scaling up what's been achieved, we must in the case of a strategy propose what has been shown to yield some success in the past.

In the end, it's Ryan who draws me in here, because I too want to see more than the rhetoric of radical social change. More than the slogans, more than the books.

Huge thanks to all of you. Recently a friend directed me to this conversation and it is incredibly in sync with work we are doing with school systems, the agricultural community and food education. The community of stakeholders is so diverse and the current system so out of whack that the only way forward is to find a new form of collaboration previously unknown, particularly when blending business and social enterprise. Having read all of the threads, each commentary has contributed or affirmed our current direction. I look forward to learning more from these discussions.

I'm a first time British author who's broken all the rules of publishing. My first non-fiction book "An Ethiopian Odyssey" began with a dream in April 2000: a dream to bring water to Ethiopia, where I lived in the early 1960's. Through my faith and dreams, I was guided to writing a book about some of my missing classmates, and travelled 25,000 miles to find them, aided by hundreds of kind men and women around the world, who wanted to help realise the dream. The book ends in NY, where two of my former classmates now live, with a visit to Ground Zero.

To honour the dream, 50% of the book's royalties are going to charity, for causes I care about: water (WaterAid Ethiopia) www.wateraid.org; peace in Israel/Palestine - Christian Aid's Middle East crisis appeal and homeless orphans: AGOHELD in Ethiopia. I set up a company to ensure that this happens correctly, working with a good ethical accountant.

I used all my savings to self publish as both US and UK publishers told me my book would never sell: Britain is also the land of the misery memoir! (The book includes amazing evidence of our interconnectedness, miracles and synchronicity when you step out with a dream in your heart.) Despite this, the dream and quest has been featured on countless websites, I've been interviewed on Voice of America, given book talks in 3 countries, and had the great honour of giving a talk at the UN on 12th September: the Ethiopian Millennium. (Please visit www.anethiopianodyssey.com for the evidence, including some high profile endorsements.) However, through word of mouth and talks, today I have readers in 19 countries, albeit sales of <1,000.

But, it's important to spread the word further, as I would like the book to sell in its millions, to help raise the necessary funds. Could anyone offer any advice about getting someone behind it/exposure, or a social publisher? Would really appreciate your views. And the book can be ordered via www.authorhouse.co.uk or www.authorhouse.com, to ensure that £1 or $2 from every sale goes to charity.

Thanks - and keep on your journey!

Annette