Along comes Ron Shaich, founder and co-CEO of Panera Bread, and most recently the creator of Panera Cares cafés. Panera Bread is among the most valuable publicly traded restaurant companies, with more than 1,600 restaurants and a market capitalization of more than $5 billion. Panera Cares looks and feels a lot like Dr. V’s Indian eye care hospitals, adding an innovative new twist to the idea of corporate social responsibility.
Reverse innovation is characterized by ultra low-cost, high quality and universal access to address the needs of deprived population in urban and rural areas of the developing world. Such innovation is “reverse” when it is brought “back” to developed countries such as the US. The concept of reverse innovation potentially applies to all industries, from telecommunications and transportation, through education, to health care.
If you are one of the millions of people who drink coffee every morning, consider drinking Green Mountain Coffee, or using one of their Keurig machines. Here’s one reason why.
I was walking up a steep hill in 100 degree heat in Northern Nicaragua earlier this month, with 25 of our social enterprise students, as part of our senior capstone class. We were in the second poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, and in one of its poorest regions, when we came upon a sign saying that Green Mountain Coffee, through its corporate social responsibility program, had supported a poor smallholder farmer cooperative with community investments.
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.
A signature program of SEI is the senior capstone course, Advanced Studies in Social Entrepreneurship. This course helps students understand the role that agricultural cooperatives and enterprises play in alleviating extreme poverty among rural smallholder farmers. To achieve this objective, students travel to Nicaragua to apply their classroom learning and engage in impact investing of …
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