Virtual Communities and Social Networks

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;

From a recent Fortune magazine that I read that most companies in S&P have been rated as risky. This represents a huge challenge for companies as new emerging economies such as India, China or other countries mean new business models which have to be sustainable and scalable and I do not think that there are in most text books or case studies of today.

There is no dispute that “Electronic Governance” is gradually entering the domain of public administration concepts and strategies in developing countries. (or, in what we term as the broader governance sphere)

One of the most important questions that needs to be answered in conventional and commercial project development processes often is “what is the value proposition of this project, service or product?”.

Conventional strategies and development approaches usually take into consideration the needs, desires, limitations, behavior, trends and interests of end users, consumers or beneficiaries. Their strategies and models do include distribution channels, delivery mechanism and intermediaries, but usually they are designed from the top-down or the bottom-up, depending on the process.

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.

Now this is an innovative idea. Move over Bottom of the Pyramid, Drool of the Pyramid markets are emerging. Check this out:

The PetsCell - the first voice enabled waterproof GPS cell phone optimized for animals, will be available for distribution (from PetsMobility in) early in 2006.

The company even has its own media division!!!

Here is how the success of my trip to Rio will be measured.

1. Do we have a fully fleshed out (albeit still iterative) storyboard for the user interaction of posting and retrieving an entry?

Estee and I have been invited as Fellows to the Symposium on Social Architectures (http://www.corante.com/events/ssa/) at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at the Harvard Law School (http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/home/) in two weeks.  The event is a partnership between the Berkman Center and Corante (http://www.corante.com/about.php), the world's first blog media company. 

Personally, I would definitely like to, even in the technology intense future, have time to sit back, relax and reflect without the sense of having to be online all the time. What scares me is that I sometimes feel the need to be online all the time, and that even when I am offline, I still am online. What are the reasons by this feeling? I wrote a draft of this blog and then discussed the draft with a friend. She actually made me change the scope of the blog, and the conclusion was that it is not only a technology problem, but also a problem in us.  I will come back to this feeling a bit later in the blog.