SOCAP OPEN is now closed. Thank you to everyone for participating and helping build a great SOCAP13. See the 2013 winners below! The top 23 entries are all coming through to SOCAP.
Garrett Melby shares the story of his journey from Wall Street financial engineering for Enron, through the heights of venture investing in the internet bubble to the founding of GoodCompany Ventures and the invention of a new model for impact investing. Social entrepreneurs are reinventing innovation but …
Winner of $1 million prize in Bloomberg Philanthropies’ Mayor’s Challenge, the Philadelphia Social Enterprise Partnership represents a new public/private partnership for harnessing social enterprise to address urban problems. Principals from Good Company, the Wharton Social Impact Initiative and the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics will unveil …
The emerging paradigm of networks couldn’t be more perfectly timed, given that the Age of Crisis is upon us. While the utility of networks is still in its infancy, the paradigm is fueling an unprecedented period of social innovation, with cooperation and reciprocity as the driving values. …
How we can use the financial leverage of private equity, the management leverage of worker ownership, and the business leverage of “lean and green” enterprise to grow prosperous, resilient, sustainable businesses and regional economies?
We seek “scale”: for scale of impact, for economies of scale. Small, local efforts can seem too slow and too limited when so much is at stake. But the impacts and economies we seek are not only achievable through rapid, unbounded growth and large global enterprise (which …
The panel will focus on the legal issues framing a broad range of social impact transactions, from structuring considerations for social enterprises to maximize investor appeal, to navigating the regulatory webs of equity crowdfunding, to structuring complex financing vehicles for innovative impact transactions. Sub-topics may include: 1) …
How can we galvanize public opinion to develop social capital? How can we create new and lasting community expectations that shape the way people act, think and behave? How can we build deeper understanding and ownership of social issues? This session will examine Public Will Building, a …
Can healthcare in the developing world be transformed by the management methods that drove McDonalds to sell over 50 million hamburgers a day? Franchising may be a dirty word in developed markets, but its benefits of quality control, brand recognition, standarization, cost control, and efficiencies achieved through …
People always talk about success stories, but most entrepreneurs don’t create the perfect company first time round. That is why we learn more from their failure than from their success. Four entrepreneurs will share in 10 images (40 seconds each) their failure: what was their original business …
Local Investing is empowering diverse community ventures and locally-focused investors to build thriving communities together. Explore the emerging local capital markets ecosystem and learn how communities can unlock previously inaccessible sources of funding. We will share real-world successes with Direct Public Offerings, local investing networks, local crowdfunding, …
Have you started the B Impact Assessment but have not had a chance to finish? Are you stumped by a few questions and need clarification? Are you simply seeking to learn more about B Certification and a community of companies using the power of business to solve …
How can you better understand the impact of your portfolio or validate your investment mandate? Once collected, what do you really do with impact data? What insights are revealed from comparing your portfolio to a larger benchmark group? And are there any trends in tracking social and …
Conflict is a powerful tool and leaning into the thorny space of interpersonal conflict in teams is critical for new ideas to emerge. Proactively managing conflict in teams is also a skill that takes a life-time to master. This interactive session will explore the balance between extreme …
Around the world impact investors are looking to expand their portfolios to include education and learning companies that target low income children. That’s good because the current global situation is dire: 10% of primary-aged students (or 61 million children) are still out of school. 71 million secondary …
Those of us who work to help social entrepreneurs scale their ventures and increase their impact must continually innovate our programs in response to a changing landscape. In this panel session, we will look at how our programs have evolved and, more importantly, how they need to …
In the last century, the way we interact with land and develop places to work and live, generate energy, grow food, and produce products have dramatically shifted to disconnect us from nature, create significant costs and challenges, and reduce our quality of life. The result is compounding …
The potential of Big Data to create social impact is immense because of the unexpected insights that analyzing vast amounts of data can throw up (see detailed note - http://goo.gl/9fkvB). Large organizations like telecom companies and governments are at the forefront of opening data up for social …
The power of media communications to accelerate social change is astounding - yet it has gone untapped. We’ve focused on the empowering the entrepreneur for the work of social change but have yet to empower the artist – those who will master the message to create cultural …
What does it take to provide high-quality capacity-building talent in the impact sector and what does it take to attract, develop, and retain that talent? This session will include a discussion addressing these questions as well as a workshop outlining the best practices in hiring top talent …
As we all know, setting goals and measuring impact is important. But what makes some ventures successful and others not? And why is it so difficult for social enterprise? Panelists will engage participants in a discussion about how social enterprises can utilize the UK Government’s experience with …
Finding ways to understand and measure our impact on everything from world peace and community cohesion to literacy and carbon dependency. Better performance and impact measurement will be a key driver in increasing the scale and effectiveness of the impact economy. For funders it will help them …
In most developing countries the public health sector cannot adequately cater to the growing demand for healthcare by its people due to a critical lack of infrastructure. For instance, Africa has less than one hospital bed per thousand people compared to a global average of 3.6. The …
Money, money, money. There is need everywhere. We want to raise a new generation and mobilize the youth! We want to provide jobs for women! We are training future leaders! And on and on. Each beautiful, each worthy. Against a backdrop of mounting social issues and game-changing …
We recently hit 400 PPM of C02 in the atmosphere - which is well beyond the threshold of sustainable. While much of the news on the climate front is often negative, we do have an abundant domestic resource that is untapped and could make a significant impact …
Important 2015 Dates
- June 7th: Final day to submit an idea.
- June 8th – June 19th: Commenting and voting period. All sessions open for voting.
- June 20th – June 29th: Judging panel and final selection by SOCAP15 Content Team.
- June 30th: Winning sessions announced to session organizers.
