Blogs

According to Michael Gove, that is. The Catholic Herald makes an interesting revelation.

A New Fund Seeks Both Financial and Social Returns says the New York Times article picturing Bono at Capitol Hill

"There is a lazy-mindedness that we afford do-gooders" said Bono, criticising the perfomance of impact investing to date. "A lot of bad deals done by good people"

Social Entrepreneurship seems a clumsy word, doesn't it.  Deriving from the French word meaning to undertake, it may have become it's own undertaker.

The original concept is attributable to Bill Drayton whose Ashoka foundation had driven many of the early efforts to apply business methods to address social problems.

Others like Skoll have followed. In all cases, supported by a nonprofit foundation which may provide start up funding, or a stipend to ensure that the entrepreneurs themselves are at least sustainable.

"Modifying the output of capitalism is the only method available to resolving the problem of capitalism where numbers trumped people – at the hands of people trained toward profit represented only by numbers and currencies rather than human beings. Profit rules, people are expendable commodities represented by numbers. The solution, and only solution, is to modify that output, measuring profit in terms of real human beings instead of numbers."

What about this?

Re-inagining capitalism: The new 'bottom line' was an article I wrote in 2013 for McKinsey's Long Term Capitalism challenge. I chose that title because of what had been argued again and again about business which takes the "bottom line' past profit and numbers.  To my knowledge, it was alone in descrbing something that had been done rather than should be done.

It would be difficult to deny an association between social enterprise and neoliberalism in the UK context. After all, it was introduced as government policy by Tony Blair and New Labour. The 2009 Social Enterprise Summit had been hosted by Lord Mandelson, who is no stranger to predatory oligarchs.

'There is nothing wrong with individuals becoming wealthy. It is only when wealth begins to concentrate in the hands of a relative few at the expense of billions of others who are denied even a small share of finite wealth that trouble starts and physical, human suffering begins. It does not have to be this way. Massive greed and consequent massive human misery and suffering do not have to be accepted as a givens, unavoidable, intractable, irresolvable.

From the International Economics for Ecology Conference at Sumy in 2010:

Neoliberalism is making us lonely, says George Monbiot, highlighting the plight of those disenfranchised in today's economy.

Noam Chomsky described neoliberalism as profit over people, so what would the converse look like?

On the face of it, Erste Bank had the right credentials. A Grameen social business partner as was Grameen Creative Labs..

In the Summer of 2010, when the Social Business Tour is  hosted in Budapest and calls  for submissions in an Idea Contest