Is hydrogen losing air?
I normally don’t read the ‘Wheels’ section of The Saturday Star. For a few months, it made for great puppy-training paper. Now its back to going straight into the recycling bin. I’m not a car guy. I don’t own a car, and I don’t care to anytime soon. However, the cover of the section last weekend did grab my attention. What followed was a great review of the status of hydrogen cars.
What do YOU have to teach?
At the conclusion of the Social Entrepreneurship Summit last week, David Pecaut, Chair of the Toronto City Summit Alliance challenged participants to reconsider the traditional paradigms of mentoring as they sought to increase the capabilities and reach of those practicing social entrepreneurialism. Regardless their chosen field, many who have laid claim to a successful career would credit one or more mentors with imparting the essential wisdom and teachings that allowed them to move through their professional rites of passage. Who are these people, how can we find them, and what secrets are they imparting?
We are pleased to announce that Aggregate Therapeutics Inc has now launched a completely redesigned website (www.aggregatetx.com).
The elegant design provides the company with a professional and appealing portal that we believe mirrors the tremendous potential of the company to provide innovative approaches to major global health issues.
A Renewable Energy World, photo by Taylor Dundee
Not doing evil apparently wasn’t enough for Google, the technology superpower. The company is now also actively doing good. Recently, Google launched a new renewable energy initiative called RE<C (math-speak for renewable energy is cheaper than coal). In 2008, the company plans to invest tens of millions of dollars in renewable energy research and development and hundreds of millions more in leading edge renewable energy projects.
In last week’s Entrepreneurship 101 lecture, Michael Erdle of Deeth Williams Wall talked about negotiating strategies. One of the questions that arose was: how can a poor entrepreneur negotiate with a powerful VC: isn’t there a power imbalance that favors the VC? After all, he/she has the money that the entrepreneur needs.
Your ecosystem of contacts
Collaboration was one of the implicit themes at last week’s Social Entrepreneurship Summit and as part of the summit’s kick-off participants were spurred to think about the strength of weak ties. What does this have to do with social entrepreneurialism and what is networking — beyond the sharing of tiny pieces of paper with our coordinates?
At the Social Entrepreneurship Summit held earlier this week, we used this definition as our starting point: “Social entrepreneurs are motivated by attacking an unmet social need through innovation that is sustainable and scalable” – and there was little debate about this, which is interesting for such a nascent field. How did we get inter-subjective agreement on what this term meant and why didn’t we get fixated on other denotations for this modification to the innovative spirit that makes a nation economically successful?
Start with watering cans. Photo by Spookygonk
Do something.
This was the message left with participants of the Social Entrepreneurship Summit by Rod Schwartz, a former investment banker and now CEO of Catalyst Fund. And it got me to thinking about watering cans.
Let me explain…
Summit Attendees discuss the issues
What an incredible day!
The Social Entrepreneurship Summit was a huge success and brought together an amazing array of ideas on how to scale social enterprise in Canada and beyond our borders. The interdisciplinary approach adopted by the summit’s organizers was precisely the collaborative model needed to develop a shared language to both explore the challenges, and celebrate the successes of those working in this space.
Having observed many pragmatic discussions over the 12-hour event, I will continue to bring you a selection of provocative excerpts; in the meantime, here are the three key themes that emerged from the discussion led by Bill Young of SCP:
The practice of social entrepreneurship may be new for some, however after today’s summit on the topic hosted at MaRS and sponsored by MaRS, The Boston Consulting Group, the Centre for Social Innovation and the Toronto City Summit Alliance, I suspect that social entrepreneurship will no longer live on Canada’s periphery.
David is a practicing management consultant and recent MBA grad from the Rotman School of Management. David’s passion for developing the thinking and leadership potential of others is manifested in both his vocation and his pro-bono efforts.
