Esterni - Bringing people to public spaces

As part of our search for ways of doing social entrepreneurship, last week we had a meeting at Cascina Cuccagna where Beniamino Saibene, founder associate of esterni received us to tell us about their project and its development.

esterni is a non-profit, cultural association born in Milan in 1995. It was the idea of Beniamino Saibene and Lorenzo Castellini which at the time felt they needed to give something back to the city in which they lived in. For this they thought about using the public space as a place for people to meet. Their main idea was to bring people out of their houses and use the street as a place to relate and make new connections. They, mostly, work on the idea of "public design", which is rethinking and redesigning public spaces and creating events where social aggregation is the key.

After sixteen years of work in Milan and Italy first, and in other countries after, esterni has a really positive case history in the field of self-sustainable socially oriented businesses. Now a days with approximately 30 workers within the organization and various freelances collaborating, esterni organizes a series of events.

Within the events they organize we can find:

- Milano Film Festival: This is one of the most important film festivals in Italy. It's a platform in which independent and young film makers can showcase their work. More info on: http://www.milanofilmfestival.it/

- Public Design Festival: As part of the events for Salone del Mobile, with this initiative they pretend to design and think for public spaces. They think about the public spaces at all levels, redesigning them to create new spaces and interventions within the city of Milan. More info on: http://www.publicdesignfestival.org/

- Cascina Cuccagna: With the idea of giving spaces back to the city, this 15th century abandoned urban farm is being refurbished and it will serve as a space in which various cultural events will be taking place. More info on: http://www.cuccagna.org/

Other initiatives worth mentioning are Audiovisiva, an event for contemporary music and video art. And the brand new Animation Film Festival still in it's first edition but aiming to grow at a good pace in the coming years.

As part of our learning experience, this meeting helped us to understand new ways of developing social enterprises, ways to find funding for them, and a series of initiatives that can be developed within the social entrepreneurship arena.

For more information on esterni visit http://www.esterni.org/

Thank you Beniamino!

Analyzing a Businass Plan - RUMA

On our lecture on business planning we had an assignment of analyzing a business plan, and for this post I'm going to analyze the Indonesian based Social Business RUMA.

Having won the first prize of the Harvard Social Enterprise “Pitch for Change” competition, the acronym that gives name to this social business literally to Your Micro Business Partner. Through their business model they pretend to empower poor women by supplying them with a kit that enables them to start their own micro franchises hence becoming micro-entrepreneurs.

Using the strucutre seen during the lecture I'll try to make the analysis:

What?

Most of the time when poor people ask for a loan, they fall into a vicious cycle of debt. This is often caused by the way the money is spent after the loan is granted. No money is generated back so, in order to repay another loan has to be made. The RUMA business addresses this problem through the lending of Microfranchises, in their own words, they lend businesses to generate money.

Literally called a Business in a Box this micro-franchises provide all the tools and training required for selling electronic airtime minutes through mobile phones.

Who?

Knowing that the mobile phone industry has a high penentration on Indonesia, RUMA partnered with the Grameen Foundation as well as with Qualcomm to put this business into work. The Grameen Foundation provided the initial investment funds through its Pioneer Fund, as well as technical assistance that helped RUMA to build its initial operational framework (which includes technology systems and human capital). Qualcomm supplied the technological expertise on mobile phones through its Wireless Reach initiative.

How?

In order for RUMA to be a successful business they stipulated that the revenues will come from selling franchise kits that will be leased to the borrower by the financial institution, as well as for a margin obtained for each airtime sale. In that sense, the borrower of the microfranchise will use the revenue obtained to repay their loans. The estimated profit for the borrower is approximately $1/day. This business defines the poor as people as those living with less $2,5 a day (World Bank poverty line), so a steady $1/day supposes a 50% overall increase.

For measuring their results, RUMA chose the Grameen Foundation's Progress out of Poverty Index (PPI) since t's country specific and it's based on a ten-question survey of readily identifiable indicators.

As for their fanantial sustainability, RUMA plans to break even within its first 2.5 years. In order to reach that goal they need to empower 5,000 of the poor and poorest by August 2011, having as a target to reach a 70% of people below the poverty line.

RUMA in numbers (current situation).

At this point, Ruma has:

• Created more than 600 new micro-business.
• 100% profitability for the micro-business owners.
• 97% of owners are women.
• 68% of business owners are below the poverty line ($2,5/day)

They also pretend to develop and deploy new business kits that deal with medical products and services, education and training, trade and distribution, and agriculture and fisheries.

For more information I leave a link were you can download a through presentation

Ruma Business Model Presentation

hacking social business: reverse engineering Bienestar's businee plan.

D4 sb bienestar analysis

View more presentations from chiara_renton.

"Reverse engineering is the process of discovering the technological principles of a human made device, object or system through analysis of its structure, function and operation."


During the last week, as a group, we worked together to prepare a structured analysis and critique to the document that had been sent to us by the Grameen Creative Lab inherent to the "Bienestar" project, which is taking place in the region of Caldas, Colombia.
The analytical model that we applied to the document is, actually, the "reverse engineering" one; in this sense we have isolated, deconstructed and analyzed every single point of it with the prospective to grasp all the possible pros and cons.
The tangible benefit that can be drawn from this type of investigation, as well as the exercise itself, is the possibility of improving an existing template or, from its fbases, to try creating an entirely new and more efficient one.

Social business in Europe: incorporation choices, finance, networks and local development

In Monday's lecture we zoomed from the big picture – the historical mission largely attributed to social business in Europe in this day and age – to across-country diversity. Enjoy!

Social Investment Bonds

A Social Impact Bond is a contract with the public sector in which a commitment is made to pay for improved social outcomes that result in public sector savings. The expected public sector savings are used as a basis for raising investment for prevention and early intervention services that improve social outcomes.
The US government is exploring the use of social impact bonds as a means of encouraging greater efficiency in the delivery of social services. It essentially involves foundations and non-profits putting up initial funding for a project with government reimbursement, and the possibility of a ‘return’ if the project meets certain goals.

The benefits of Social Impact Bonds could be:
- More funds are available for prevention and early intervention services;
- The public sector only has to pay for effective services; the third party investor bears all the risk of services being potentially ineffective.
- Investors and services have an incentive to be as effective as possible, because the larger impact they have on the outcome, the larger the repayment they will receive.

According to the New York Times, President Obama is to launch in 2011 seven pilot schemes, which would issue a total of $100 million in bonds to support programs in the areas of job training, education, juvenile justice and children’s disabilities.

The Rockefeller Foundation has announced a $400,000 grant to the Nonprofit Finance Fund for a number of projects that will help bring the social impact bond concept to the US. The Fund, a community-development financial institution, recently launched an online platform for funders, non-profits and educators to share ideas about the bonds. After gathering research and opinions, they will conduct a feasibility study of the bonds in the US and identify opportunities where the financing structure could work.

The Big Society - For Dummies

4 Minute Film from Big Society on Vimeo.

Here is The Big Society, flagship policy idea of the 2010 UK Conservative Party election manifesto.

The aim is "to create a climate that empowers local people and communities, building a big society that will 'take power away from politicians and give it to people'" by encouraging charities, volunteering, social enterprises. Prime Minister David Cameron, is trying to make UK citizens ask themselves this kind of questions, "how can I do more, other than paying taxes and obeying the law, in order to make my country stronger and better place?".

Well, I have to say from a theoretical point of view it sounds pretty solid but in the real world things seem to get significantly complicated.

In my opinion, it is not so much about involving people to do the jobs covering for inevitable cuts in public services made by the Government, the great difficulty will rely on changing the mindset of 62 million of Britons. Especially in European countries where we take welfare programs for granted, and many times claiming these to be more generous every year regardless of the socio-economic environment. Evidently, this affects the transition creating a desynchronization in which the State is already cutting expanses in public services and where The Big Society is still too young and innocent to take the steering wheel. Useless to say this is causing more inequalities amongst the poor and the rich.
However, I find important to keep in mind that the Big Society is also valid even if increasing public expenditure since the goal will always remain the same: more empowerment, freedom, responsibility and control for communities allowing the Government to focus on other non accessible aspects of our society.

The Big Society is a Governmental initiative and so unfortunately these are never well perceived by the populace. Trying to tackle this issue, the conservatives are structuring a whole platform called StartUp Britain, in order to get new businesses going as well as a better social entrepreneurial friendly environment.

Here's my way of seeing this, I don't think anyone could tell if this is the solution right now but what I do know is that in UK there is will for change and when there's a will...

Zipcar: Wheels When You Want Them!

Zipcar is a car-sharing service that offers urban residents, whether on an individual, business or university level, an alternative to car ownership. Its on demand and self-service model provides solutions to issues such as parking, congestion and transportation. This new model for automobile transportation is more cost-effective and hassle-free than owning, renting or leasing a car.

The development of new technologies, such as RFID (radio frequency identification), in addition to the birth of new user profiles, led to the emergence of Zipcar’s concept by creating an agent-artifact space.
The need was generated through the specific user profiles; people who live in cities and use public transport but need cars from time to time, or people who want to save money and don’t want to go through the hassle of owning a car, or even people who refrain from buying cars for environmental reasons.
You might be thinking, “but what’s so special about Zipcar? It’s just like another car rental company.” Well, what Zipcar did, is that it eliminated the intermediary relationship a customer usually has with a car rental company and replaced it with self-service accessibility to the car through the RFID card. Small change, big difference.

The way Zipcar works is quite simple:

Each new member that joins Zipcar’s community on the webpage http://www.zipcar.com/ receives a Zipcard powered by RFID technology. The member browses the cars available through the website by time, location, price or model. Once the car is chosen and booked, the member heads towards the parking spot and uses the activated Zipcard to lock and unlock the doors of the car. After the trip is over, the user returns the car to the same location.

The Zipcar concept is environmentally friendly and is changing the way people think about owning a car. Fewer cars on the road means less congestion, less pollution, less fuel consumption, less stress and fresher air. To top that, “over 40% of Zipcar members either sell their car or stop a car-purchasing decision.”

Now that’s innovation!

Working Wikily - Social Change with a Network Mindset

While browsing the web trying to find some business plans to analyze for the class, I stumbled upon this blog. Working Wikily.

The blog was created by the Monitor Insitute, which is an entity that aims (as they would say in their own words) "to help innovative leaders develop and achieve sustainable solutions to significant social and environmental problems". They do this by giving consultancy, serving as a think tank of new trends, and being an incubator of new approaches and ideas.

The Working Wikily blog has the purpose "of providing practitioners in the social sector with a filter for the events that are pushing the field towards a more networked form of work and a perspective on how and why those events are unfolding".

In our case, this becomes relevant since we are doing a Master in Design For Social Business. We work inside the social sector, and the first part of this module was about setting a collaborative environment in order to approach any project in general (in this case our own experience of learning what is social business).

Networking is working in collaboration with others, building channels in which relationships are established and new ideas and ways of working are bred. This blog contains a lot of relevant articles, resources, and links that we may find useful in this new adventure we are taking part of...

For starters I leave you with a link where you can download their paper Working Wikily 2.0 in which they create the whole frame set for this approach to social innovation.

Enjoy!

The emergent world we live in

When the telephone was rolled out as a commercial product, AT&T spent a few decades trying to persuade its customers not to use it to call their friends and families. Edison thought the phonograph would be used to record last wills. Gutenberg thought he was gong to print Bibles and indulgences to add to the splendour of the Church, and could not have seen the printing-press enabled Protestant Reformation coming. Innovation is not just about new gizmos. It is about what people decide gizmos are.

In this lecture, I offer a complexity perspective on innovation. I argue innovation is emergent; it happens in cascades; it is inherently unpredictable; it is sparked in the context of relationships, not in the mind of lone inventor. Furthermore, I argue that social innovation has just the same characteristics as vanilla technical innovation. Enjoy.

Ærø & Our Emergent World

In today’s session about innovation and our emergent world, we mentioned one of the Danish Baltic Sea islands, Aero, because of its technologies in energy generation so I thought it might be interesting to share these photos with you. 
I visited Aero last summer, and it is a truly charming island with beautiful natural scenery and remarkable picturesque houses. Although its inhabitants sum up to a rough total of 7,000 people, I barely saw anyone there under the age of 60! Yet, Aero remains serious about being environmental friendly and has the world’s largest solar power plants aiming to make the island completely self-sufficient in energy. Today, all of Denmark is following Aero's lead.
If innovation adaptation is not simply technology dependent but also socially dependent, then way to go people of Aero! 

Join Social Business Talk

Hello to everyone,

we're a team of seven as creative as down-to-earth people attending to the Master program called Design for Social Business (D4SB) introduced by IED this year.
According with Alberto Cottica, we are of the idea of extending this blog, which was initially formed as a platform for us to share opinions and critical viewpoints concerning the concept of Social Business.

The reason is having the opportunity to share ideas we have with other students, they will contribute as outside, interested and active observers with their remarks and considerations to this project.
We are sure that exchanging opinions and intuitions will bring new and diverse reasoning to all of us as well as for all of you who decide to be involved!

So please, be ready and willing to join us because we are all interested of yours point of view and please, do not be afraid of posting ideas in English, let's do it in Italian if you'd like, or in Spanish, French, Romanian and Portuguese or even in Arabic if you want!
We're an international team, and we do think that a good idea is a good idea also without any translation.

the D4SB team!

Social Business Talks: Contributors

Social Business Talks: Contributors

Social business in Europe: the big picture

Social business in Europe: the big picture

Keeping in the background the structure of a business plan – covered in last week's lecture, the fourth of my module — we now begin to build a strong case for great social business ideas. In lecture number five I argued that rising costs of welfare are forcing every country in the world to rethink their welfare systems. Europe, where the welfare state is most advanced, has the most redesign to do. This is a change of historical proportion, and European decision makers feel it is urgent to take action. Everywhere social entrepreneurs are expected to come up with solutions to re-engineer the welfare state (but also other areas of heavy government intervention, like sustainability, mobility and energy issues).
Consistently with expectations, Europe is bracing to make serious investments in these solutions, and this presents a major opportunity to social business. The assignments in my last slide are going to be carried over to next week, as this week students are going to be working on an entry to the competition for social business ideas proposed by Tiago and agreed upon by everyone.

Kickstarter: A New Way to Fund & Follow Creativity

Kickstarter is an online funding platform for creative projects in the world such as music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and many more. Although it is not directly targeted to solving social issues, I find it’s business model very intriguing based on people with mutual interests and motivations and their willingness to share, help and collaborate.

WHAT:
Kickstarter is an online platform that allows almost anyone to raise funding from potential interested individuals.
Baio, Kickstarter’s CTO, explains:
“The model is simple: a project creator sets a fundraising goal, deadline, and an optional set of rewards for backers. If the goal’s reached by the deadline, then everyone’s charged via Amazon Payments and the backers get their goodies. If the goal’s not reached, nobody’s charged. It’s all or nothing.”

WHO:
Anyone with an interesting project idea that needs funding but doesn’t want to go along asking friends and family for financial support can communicate with the masses through this platform. Kickstarter’s community members, aka ‘backers’, browse through the projects, choose the one they are interested in, and help co-found the project by donating part of the funding.

HOW:
The attached diagram is a simple way to explain how the business model works. Kickstarter recieves small payments from the ‘backers’ who wish to support a certain project. In return, Kickstarter provides the ‘creator’ of the project with exposure on its online platform and with the required funding to complete the project. The fund seeker, in order to convince the community members to support the project, will have to promise exclusive and personalized gifts as an incentive depending on the amount donated.
If the full amount of money pledged is raised within the given period of time, the project goes through. If not, and in order to protect both parties, the project is annulled and no money is charged upfront from the members.

Check out some of the wonderful projects completed or in the process on Kickstarter’s webpage: http://www.kickstarter.com/

Kiva "L'accesso a un conto bancario è un diritto dell'uomo" (Matt Flannery, Kiva)

Basically this is an online microlending organization which was recently founded by Jessica Jackley and Matt Flannery. Both of them, impressed about Yunus work's philosophy, decided to elaborate an online platfom through which, normal people and workers from the North of the world could lend small/big amount of money to entrepreneurs from developing countries, just using internet and a credit card.

What I consider innovative is the idea of a concrete help from ordinary to ordinary people, as a challange of faith. You do not need to be a huge investors, not a bank or a great organization. And you are not supposed to offer a big deal of money, but a small amount, which is what normal people can afford and what people in developing country usually needs. Even more, what sounds great is that results of this campaign seems to be impressive, and people answers positively and willing to this "market".
Here you are links to have a look..

http://www.kiva.org/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=08nEsWrVZSs
http://mag.wired.it/rivista/storie/matt-flannery.html

Refugees United

Refugees United (RU) is a US-registered non-profit, founded in 2006 by two Danish brothers, Christopher and David Mikkelsen, that aims to be a Google for refugee search: an easy, accessible platform that enables the displaced to find their families.

It is true that this Project has no aim to produce income, but I'm convinced that we can consider it as a good Idea where to start building a plan, since it is always from a good idea that it is possible to work on something and that the concept at the base of whatever our research must be fundamental.

RU_project was born from two Danish brothers. Because of their father job, they have been travelled a lot and all over the place, increasing their sensitivity relates to human right and conditions. Always keeping an eye open on the immigration's issue, when it was time to moved back to Denmark, Christopher and David Mikkelsen keep on working in the social field.
That since they came up with this idea of creating a network platform, similar to facebook somehow, to allow people, refugees, to find themselves after emigrations or escapes. People that, because of the tough, conflictual conditions of their countries, got to leave their families and escape.

I've read about this on wired (March 2011), and here there is the link if you want to have a look yourselves.
I think it is interesting and even more, if helping people to be happy, in the concrete sense of this word, could be considered a social income, it means this plan-project do is a proper social business example!

http://www.refunite.org/
http://www.wired.co.uk/magazine/archive/2011/02/features/refugees-united-christopher-and-david-mikkelsen?page=1

Stanford University Social Entrepreneurship Start-up

I found the example from the lecture and thought it would make sense to read it and share it with you guys (the business plan for LED technology implementation in developing countries) – Standfort University Social Entrepreneurship Start-up Report.

http://ses-1.stanford.edu/reports/global.pdf

The business plan is, in my opinion, only the structure of a real business plan that can support all this social impact of bringing more efficient lighting solutions to the developing world with numbers, measurable goals and timing. Standfort University is actually saying in this report that 3 individual, stand alone business plans for China, India and Mexico were developed (found China which is much more complete and detailed). The main concern in this report is the social impact of such a product but it lacks all the economic part, some detailed paths in order to achieve the goals and the time issue is totally ignored. Everything is explained in general, some parts built just on common sense and with too little probability of success (3 employees with too daring objectives worldwide). I didn’t get their enthusiasm for franchising, a step in my opinion too early to be taken into consideration, as well as the whole fundraising issue which seems too positive and without a concrete sustainable part. In the part where partners should be taken into consideration, there is no criterion of selection (to be in line with the values or to have proven success??).

For a more detailed business plan, take a look at China pilot case:
http://ses-1.stanford.edu/reports/china.pdf

POST TEST

Testing FeedBurner and the logo on footer.

Business planning for social entrepreneurs - Episode 1

Admittedly, this is a pretty grim part of the course: the place where our dreams of changing the world by innovation and goodwill have to come to terms with the "business" in social business – and some of them will come down in flames. It was all about rigour, data, and hard economic logic. Students took it in stride: well done!

Let me remind us of the rules of engagement for this part of the course.

1. we are going to be completely honest and trasparent about our business case. Remember, business planning is a troubleshooting exercise: if you try to camouflage your errors they may not show up – until it's too late, and you are committed to running a crippled business. 
2. we are going to be very upfront with our feedback about each other's business planning. Be generous when praising, merciless when criticizing. No ego massaging or bleeding hearts allowed :-)
3. we are not going to take offense when somebody else exposes our mistakes. This is not personal: criticism is, actually, a very precious gift.

All clear?

Blog Design and Interface

As everybody has already noticed, I've been making a lot of edits to the design of the blog since last wednesday. Now I think I have almost everything ready so here you have a post on the entire process I went through in order to arrive to this solution.

As with every web project, I started off (even before thinking about anything else) trying to structure the information into different levels (according to usability and interface, this means the amount of times that the user has to click in order to arrive to the information that he or she is interested in).

With this in mind I created a framework or map of the Blog, dividing the information into the different levels wich I thought were important.

Now I'll try to explain myself.

For starters, a blog is not like an actual webpage so the homepage has already "embedded" with lots of information that you wouldn't normally see in a site (meaning an introductory page). That is why on the first level of information we have 4 menu buttons. Which would translate as the 4 main subjects of the blog.

For this menu buttons I tried to use names wich are as closer to the content of the page as possible to eliminate any kind of confusion. That is why the page posts, is called posts and not home (I believe that blogs have no homepage).

If you analyze the posts page, you'll see all of the sub-menus come into scene.

In order to make access to information easier, I took advantage of the sidebar. This way the information is always available independent from where you are inside the blog (it doesn't matter if the user is in the page with all the posts or inside an specific url within the blog, the access to these assets will be always available). In terms of usability this is an advantage, and prevents the end user (wether is us or somebody else) of digging into subsequent menus in order to find the information that he/she may find useful.

Apart from including blogger default gadgets I also "embedded" external applications for the same reason, you don't need to create new pages in order to have this information available, since it will always stay on the sidebar.

There are a lot of ways in which the end user can find information that is useful. I added 3 gadgets for that purpose, the search bar, the blog archive, and the labels (tags). I did this in order to once again facilitate the access to specific themes/information/subjects to the end user.

Right now, I just added this few gadgets, applications, and external links; but we have to keep in mind that this is an ongoing process and this sub-menu can always change. One of the things that comes into my mind is that we can add a photo gallery, or even a video log after we return from the trips, but that is for us to agree on it and see if we find it useful.

You'll also see that I've put 2 about buttons, in my opinion I think that it is important to differentiate what is social business from the actual purpose of this blog (although they are both related, they are still different concepts).

One thing that I eliminated was the contributors gadget. I transformed it into a page (menu item) of its own, since we are already preparing a profile for each one of us, this page could contain that same profile, including a picture of each one as well as a link to our different webpages (in case we have one). This will add up, and it's a resource for anyone that wants to investigate more about the authors and the blog itself.

The colors are chosen following the palette that we have been using so far (red, gray and dark gray). The only thing that I changed was the typography of the post titles to make them stand out a little bit more. Once again, this is subject to modification, we have to discuss and agree in which colors best identify us as a group or as a course.

One thing that is very important is that we ALL have to agree on the visual aspect of the blog to make it consistent. How are we going to put the images; always on top? Always on the bottom? Are they going to go all toghether? What font size should we use for sub-titles?. All of these questions have to be taken into account to make our blog visually consistent. You'll see that I have re-"designed" some of the posts in order for everything to look more or less the same, but we should try to embed this way of thinking and apply it from the beginning of the process.

Another thing is, how are we going to do the labeling? From my experience I think is better to tag word by word instead of using frases or compound words such as social bussiness. This also will give us a very clear visual reference of what are the words (concepts) that we are tagging more (therefore writing more about) when we see the Tag Cloud.

Once again, all of these questions are subject to change, I'll wait for your comments, critiques, etc. In what is it that you think we can do in order to improve the blog not only design wise but also the way we use it...

Hope that I explained myself (I'm not really good at writing)