“The Valley of Death is the chasm between a new social innovation and the market that could greatly benefit from that innovation.” - Professor Gordon Adomdza “The Valley of Death is where all good products go when you don’t have the right business model to carry them across the valley to successful launch.” - John DiRienzo, …
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It is with great enthusiasm and excitement that I recently joined Northeastern University and the Social Enterprise Institute as an Assistant Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation.
Let’s consider the question of what is the right or best kind of motivation for the rapidly growing class of social entrepreneurs. It’s a hot area, with a lot of new entrants, and not much in the way of rules and guidelines.
Ellie Deshaies, a senior International Affairs major at Northeastern, completed her third co-op at an organization called FACE AIDS. FACE AIDS provides socioeconomic support for youth affected by HIV and AIDS in Rwanda.
Formal and dignified employment eludes billions of people around the world, but Samasource, a highly innovative social business, acknowledges the internet as a democratizing and empowering force that can provide dignified work. Samasource connects women and youth earning under $3 a day to microwork: computer-driven piecework conducted over the internet that provides a fair wage and valuable job training skills to the those formerly excluded from the formal sector.
The idea of “impact investing” is gaining a great deal of attention these days, including in undergraduate education. While many institutions have offered classes in strategic philanthropy in recent years, and of course in traditional business investing for many, we have focused our efforts at SEI on developing educational programs for a new third way of investing. This new investment discipline involves socially minded investors providing capital to both for profit and non-profit enterprises that are committed to efficiently addressing social problems in both a sustainable and innovative way.