Peer2Politics

We have high expectations of social business. We want it to combine economic profitability, social impact and innovation, at scales large enough to make a true difference. As this video byAshoka (the leading global network of social entrepreneurs) highlights, there is only one way to achieve this – by bringing together the expertise and competencies of different actors: social entrepreneurs, businesses and public authorities. Only together can they efficiently tackle challenges that they could not have solved alone – and co-creation is also a healthy way to ensure that the final result benefits everyone.

Open thread: what does social enterprise mean to you?

It’s been a busy few weeks for the mainstream smartphone market, with two new iPhones, iOS 7 and a BlackBerry handset seeing the light of day. But in a trendy pop up space in London’s Soho on Wednesday evening, a Dutch entrepreneur stood in front of tech geeks and tree huggers alike to present a very different kind of device.

Muhammad Yunus, founder of Grameen Bank, has explained his current advocacy for Social Business in an article entitled

However you define it, social business is changing the world.

Knowledge work is in may ways different from the transformational and transactional work that organizations have tried to automate and improve with information technology over the past few decades. A colleague of mine said, that as knowledge workers, we don't follow a process; we follow a cloud of activities. In other words, we are creating the process as we go along. To do that we need to use our creativity, we need to look beyond the standard ways of doing things, and we need to ask a lot of questions. This is something completely different to how it is to work at a production line in a factory, where workers are supposed to follow predefined and highly repeatable processes and procedures. There, asking questions and questioning rules is often out of the question, as it has the potential to disrupt operations.

With the trend of self-employment and freelancing on a sharp rise (now one in three employees in the U.S.), there are a lot of questions popping up about how to make money in this new business marketplace.

The reason is simple: the solution economy grows to fill the space it’s given, and certain regions offer habitats more hospitable for a robust solution economy than others. Their governments provide room for creativity, their businesses embrace new measures of value, and their investors trust alternative currencies of return.