Collaboration

Why business models are critical to innovation in emerging economies – From social entrepreneurship to building an idea or a business – Part 1

Emerging economies represent new challenges for ideas and businesses, which is why new social entrepreneurship opportunities are now the Petri-dish for what is emerging. Some examples exist of great reference;

Facilitating United Nations reform through partnership. That's the title of a recent report presented on December 2005 by the United Nations on how "United Nations partners with business and civil society in order to advance a cause or to place an issue on the global agenda. Such partnerships leverage the reputation and networks of the United Nations and key stakeholders to promote vital development issues, including the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). As cases profiled in this report show, business can make an important contribution to agenda setting not only through financial support, but also through its expertise and extensive reach. This holds true both for the demand side, through outreach to its consumer base, and for the supply side, through its relations with suppliers and other business partners."

I am extremely appreciative of the Digital Vision Program by Reuters and Stanford University. As a young researcher, advocate and believer in the potential of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in changing the socio-economic landscape of communities, I am also grossly aware of the lack of participation and collaboration across stakeholders of ICTs-supported programs and projects the world over.

An interesting kind of church it is.

About 20,000 people attend Willow Creek every week, making it one of the largest churches in the nation. And like other so-called "megachurches"—defined by average weekly attendance of more than 2,000 people—technology is essential to almost every phase of its mission. There are perhaps 1,800 megachurches in the U.S., including a subset of truly gargantuan institutions whose attendance can approach 20,000, or more. And the bigger they are, the more they tend to rely on technology.

Unless research groups remain in continuous contact, interaction and exchange communication with the rest of the stakeholders, their separation from the actual development and deployment process generates a dangerous discontinuity and an unnecessary gap between observation, design, deployment and redesign.

The Different Nature of ICT Projects

Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) projects are different from common manufactured or consumer products in that they are not built through an expensive production line that requires physical resources difficult to change and modify.

Social entrepreneurship is basically to create a social impact on different communities, but how are these communities really reacting to entrepreneurial solutions, and especially new technology? For any social enterprise it is crucial to understand the audience and even more important to understand how they will react to exposure to a new technology. I talked to a friend about another thing, and he sent me a link to a manuscript of a speech "A Group Is Its Own Worst Enemy" that Clay Shirky held at Social Software at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology conference in Santa Clara on April 24, 2003.

I found the concept of "Not Just For Profit" group very interesting.

We can clearly see the profit-driven business model resulted serious market failures and created the extreme wealth and poverty in the world, which in term causes many social economic problems and environmental imbalance.