SustainAbility got its start in the consumer arena, publishing the first Green Consumer Guide nearly 20 years ago, a book which sold around a million copies worldwide and helped jump-start a new round of consumer pressure on business. When it peaked in the 1990's, the green consumer movement was comprised largely of educated, middle class women (aka soccer moms). At the time, research showed that 70 percent of green consumers were women, strongly skewed towards two groups: first, pregnant women or recent mothers, and second mothers with school-age children, who tended to come home and ask tricky questions about products and packaging.

But what goes up can come down - and when the second great societal pressure wave (peaking 1988-1991) began to fall away, green consumer activity began to fade, even though the shock-waves continued to reverberate, encouraging companies to carry out environmental audits, invest in product life-cycle assessments and, eventually, to begin environmental reporting.

With today's tidal wave of media coverage around climate change - and the resulting rise in awareness about the issue - we wonder if there isn't a new green consumer emerging. If social and environmental entrepreneurs are accurate signposts for future markets, there most likely is.

Take GreenKnickers for example. A London-based start-up, GreenKnickers markets sustainable - you guessed it - knickers! (For my American friends... they sell underwear.) By making 'green' fun, hip and somewhat irreverent, the company is attempting to reach a cooler crowd.

Speaking of cool... Global Cool, which is headed by former Man Group guy, Julian Knight, is using celebrities to encourage and enable at least one billion people to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by at least one tonne for the next ten years. A big target for them is India - and they've brought in Bollywood to help with the cause.

And one of my recent favourites is a start-up called diykyoto, which has designed a home energy monitor called 'The Wattson'. This very i-pod-looking device glows blue when your home energy use is efficient and red when you're guzzling. Information is a powerful tool for change. But it's even more powerful when it's packaged in an iconic, must-have device.

Trying to motivate a broader audience may prove challenging, however. Anecdotal feedback from those attending the Live Earth concerts suggest that most were there simply to see the stars. And, a recent post by Joel Makower is a painful reminder of how difficult it is to motivate the masses around green. (See Joel's 25 July post.)

So, how can Global Cool ensure that it moves people to action beyond its star-studded events? And, how can the folks at GreenKnickers and diykyoto ensure they don't become last year's fad? According to a colleague at IDEO, companies must ensure that they are in the consumer's 'direct line of sight' - truly tapping into what's motivating that consumer to action. Or, as Joel Makower notes - 'marketers must not only help consumers to understand the problem, but to actually care about it.' No easy task.

If you know of organizations that are up to the challenge, you may want to submit their names to Century Films, which is spearheading the latest Participant Productions (producers of An Inconvenient Truth) mainstream media blitz on the issue. See the Green Awards site more information.

The Schwab Foundation has launched a competition to uncover the world's most successful social entrepreneurs. They are currently looking at the following countries: Brazil, Israel, France, Chile, Colombia, United Kingdom, Argentina, United States, and Switzerland.

If you or someone you know is a social entrepreneur in any of these countries - check out competition details for Social Entrepreneur of the Year at:

www.schwabfound.org

Application due dates range from 31 May to 2 July - so hurry!

Best of luck!

Disarming youth soldiers in Africa - Battling blindness in India - Stopping sex slavery in Sri Lanka. Remarkable aims and accomplishments in their own right. Even more remarkable if you consider that these are efforts launched by teens. The power of the millennial generation to change the world was the focus of the Brick Awards last night at the Nokia Theater in New York's Times Square. Founded by Andrew Shue (of Melrose Place and LA Galaxy fame), Do Something hosts these annual awards to showcase the passion and potential of young people. And, I was clearly not the only one moved by these stories - event presenters included Susan Sarandon, Wyclef Jean, and LeAnn Rimes. Get inspired - watch the awards this Thursday, 12 April at 9pm EST on The CW.

Climate change, trade and social entrepreneurship were the three big themes at Davos 2007, for me at least. True, others may have had a different priority list and it has taken me rather longer than in previous years to work out what was really going on during the 2007 World Economic Forum - or at least what struck me as most significant. This was partly because I plunged straight back into work on my return to London, but also because my sense was that this year really did mark a watershed year for the Forum—whether or not those attending Davos this year really grasped what is going on.

So here is a personal download of both the Davos event and of the Schwab summit, which proceeded it - and this year focused on the business case both for social entrepreneurship and for mainstream business to get involved in the field. Please also see postings on my website (http://www.johnelkington.com/weblog/blogger.htm) and for ATCA (see February 02 posting on my blog), for openDemocracy (http://www.opendemocracy.net/globalization-climate_change_debate/fixes_4311.jsp) and for Grist (in press).

But first, yes, the agenda (http://www.weforum.org/en/events/annualmeeting2007/index.htm) was extraordinarily packed again this year, and the top two issues for the mainstream participants were clear. Climate change was ubiquitous, with 17 sessions devoted to the subject, while the other dominant theme was the need to reinvigorate the Doha Round of trade negotiations. But it struck me that something else was going on this year - and it felt a bit like a hand-over between generations. Alongside the efforts of the Young Global Leaders (http://www.younggloballeaders.org/), my sense was that this was the year that social entrepreneurs really got into their stride in Davos.

And of the clearest trends this year, again, was the growing focus on private sector, business and financial market solutions to the world’s great social, environmental and governance challenges. Multinationals are seen to have a key role to play in upholding and advancing principles on human rights, labour, environmental and anti-corruption practices in countries with weak regulatory capacity. For more on WEF initiatives in these fields, see http://www.weforum.org/en/initiatives/index.htm

Very much in the spirit of this year’s summit, British Prime Minister Tony Blair sounded an optimistic note in his closing remarks. He said that the three key issues that for him dominated the annual meeting - world trade, climate change and Africa—still hang in the balance, but added that there had been progress on each that would have seemed unimaginable even a short time back. In two radical suggestions, Blair recommended merging the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, and dramatically expanding the UN Security Council. "A UN Security Council without Germany, Japan, Brazil or India, to say nothing of any African or Muslim nation," he said, "will, in time, not merely lose legitimacy in the eyes of the world, but seriously inhibit effective action."

In what follows, I will try to sketch out come of the highlights and headlines before zeroing in the social entrepreneurs - who convened for the 2007 Schwab Foundation Annual Summit at Swiss Re’s Rüschlikon centre in Zurich before heading on to Davos. I attended both events, chairing a plenary session on the business case for social entrepreneurship at the Schwab summit and was involved in a number of related events in Davos - including a fascinating session I facilitated on ‘Designing Sustainable Cities.’

Schwab Summit

This was the seventh Schwab Summit (http://www.schwabfound.org/the.htm?p=102) I have intended, the sense now being fairly widespread that the notion of social entrepreneurship “has had a meteoric rise,” as the Schwab team put it, “particularly in the industrialised world, but increasingly in emerging markets.” It is clear that we are seeing the very early stages of a great convergence between the worlds of mainstream business and social and environmental entrepreneurship - an area SustainAbility is looking at in its series of annual surveys of the state of social entrepreneurship for The Skoll Foundation (http://www.skollfoundation.org/).

One of the key indications of the growing mainstream support came when Jacques Aigrain, CEO of Swiss Re, announced that in addition to hosting the Schwab Summit this year at their Rüschlikon centre (http://www.ruschlikon.net/), they would also host it there in future years.

Among key sessions were those focusing on how foundations and other investors decide which social entrepreneurs to support, the change-making agendas of key entrepreneurs, the business case as developed by social entrepreneurs, the mainstream business case for social entrepreneurship, how such change agents can best work in government and the public sector, and—based on a discussion about the process by which Ethos (http://www.ethoswater.com/) sold out to Starbucks—what happens when a social entrepreneur “sells out.” For some of the story of how the founders got to this point, see http://www.ethoswater.com

Overall, the Schwab Summit was even higher energy than in previous years—and excellent preparation for those social entrepreneurs who were going on to Davos. And this is an area I personally am increasingly determined to invest a growing part of my time in - as with my role with the newly announced DHL Young Entrepreneurs for Sustainability Awards, (http://www.dhl.com/) now being piloted in five Asian countries.

A Schizophrenic Davos

“Shit is serious business,” is the motto of one of those entrepreneurs, Isaac Durojaiye, founder of DMT Mobile Toilets (http://www.dmttoilet.com/), in whose delightful company Elaine and I took the train from the Schwab Summit to Davos. He is one of the Schwab entrepreneurs (http://www.schwabfound.org/schwabentrepreneurs.htm?schwabid=3725). And it’s truly extraordinary to see these people moving between the worlds of sanitation in Nigeria, for example, and the world of Davos—this being the sixth time I have attended the WEF event. Their presence is one more sign that the world of Davos Man is experiencing seismic changes.

“We are faced by a world which is increasingly schizophrenic,” said WEF Founder and Executive Chair early on in the proceedings. On the surface, the economic indicators might look fairly optimistic, but underneath a range trends are moving in less encouraging directions. “Our world is rapidly changing and power is shifting geopolitically, in business terms and even in the virtual world,” he noted. “Power, wealth and well-being are spread in ever more complex ways, leading to a world which is harder and harder to understand and which often seems alien to us.”

In her plenary speech early on in the summit, Angela Merkel, Federal Chancellor of Germany, and due to take over as G8 President this year, announced efforts for "new forms of dialogue" between G8 leading industrial nations and the emerging economies such as Brazil, India and China (BIC) - along with a closer Atlantic partnership between Europe and the United States. But apart from Senators John Kerry and John McCain, US political leaders were less evidently present this year.

The theme was ‘The Shifting Power Equation.’ Over the course of the five-day meeting, 2,400 participants from 90 countries convened, including 24 heads of state or government, 85 cabinet ministers, along with religious leaders, media leaders and heads of non-governmental organizations. Around 50% of the participants were business leaders drawn principally from the Forum's members - 1,000 of the foremost companies from around the world and across all economic sectors.

A new survey of WEF participants found that a majority of leaders questioned think the next generation will live in a more economically prosperous world. Two-thirds (65%) say that it will be a lot more or a little more prosperous. But the same respondents also indicated that the next generation will live in a less safe world, with 61% believing it would be a little or a lot less safe. Both these figures are broadly in line with the same findings last year. But one finding that has shown a remarkable change is the doubling of those who rank environmental protection as a priority for world leaders. Warnings of the effects of climate change appear to be hitting home with protecting the environment a concern that one in five (20%) think leaders should concentrate on - a considerable increase since last year’s survey, when only 9% rated this as a priority.

One of the key publications launched during the event was the Global Risks 2007 report (http://www.weforum.org/pdf/CSI/Global_Risks_2007.pdf), which highlighted a growing disconnect between the power of global risks to cause major systemic disruption, and our ability to mitigate them. The annual Global Risks report - published by WEF in cooperation with Citigroup, Marsh & McLennan Companies, Swiss Re and the Wharton School Risk Center - suggested that many of the 23 core global risks explored in the report have worsened over the last 12 months, despite growing awareness of their potential impacts.

Among the recommendations:

1. Link energy security considerations with climate change;

2. Urgently begin work on a successor to the Kyoto agreement with three central principles: ensure involvement of the US and major developing countries (particularly China and India); and recognize differential responsibilities for future emissions’ reduction dependent upon past emissions and stage of economic development—alongside and common overall responsibility for climate change

3. Renew terrorism insurance schemes scheduled to sunset in 2007; improve framework for public-private arrangements in other countries, and

4. Prepare for a pandemic, requiring governments to increase research into the identification of critical choke-points in the supply/value chain where skill sets are rare, interdependencies are greatest and the risk of triggering systemic failure is highest.

Opening up

The number of NGOs seemed to have been cut back substantially this year - and the voice of those NGOs that did appear were more muted than in previous years - though I may simply have been in the wrong sessions. That said, the Forum is more open to the wider universe of stakeholders than it was even a few years back. And it experimented this year with a number of new Web applications designed to extend the discussions to a much wider audience. The major debates and discussions were open to the general public via traditional broadcast channels, but also via webcasts, podcasts and for the first time, vodcasts. Some 50 of 220 sessions were webcast.

Internet users were encouraged to field questions to participants via blogs and videoblogs and selected participants were interviewed live in the virtual world of Second Life. Intriguingly, Reuters had a special Second Life correspondent in Davos (http://secondlife.reuters.com/) and—having had a session back in London with Mitch Kapor, Chairman of Linder Labs (http://lindenlab.com/), the organization behind Second Life, SustainAbility is now pondering how to make our own entry into this new world. A podcast featuring Mitch Kapor will be posted on the Skoll Program area of our website (http://www.sustainability.com/insight/skoll_article.asp?id=669) within days.

In terms of opening up the wider world, one of the most interesting people I met during this year’s Davos was Nick Negroponte, who is the main driver behind the One Laptop Per Child initiative - designed to provide $100 laptops to young people around the world (http://www.laptop.org/).

The climate imperative

Although climate change was voted onto the WEF agenda in 1999 or 2000, and has routinely surfaced since then, this year the subject was centre-stage - owing much to Al Gore’s move An Inconvenient Truth (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Inconvenient_Truth), the Sir Nicholas Stern’s review on the economic implications of climate change (http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk), and the impending report of the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change (http://www.ipcc.ch/).

The Forum announced the formation of a new international partnership of seven organizations to establish a generally accepted framework for climate risk-related reporting by corporations. Founding members of the institutional consortium, the Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB), include the California Climate Action Registry, Carbon Disclosure Project, Ceres, The Climate Group, International Emissions Trading Association, World Economic Forum Global Greenhouse Gas Register and World Resources Institute.

CDSB member organizations have agreed to align their core requests for information from companies in order to ensure that they report climate change-related information in a standardized way that facilitates easier comparative analysis by investors, managers and the public. The focus will be on the disclosure of the following key climate issues in company annual reports: total emissions; assessment of the physical risks of climate change; assessment of the regulatory risks of climate change; and strategic analysis of climate risk and emissions management.

Although in recent years there has been much progress in raising awareness of the importance of climate-related disclosure among corporations and their boards and shareholders, reporting of comparable information in annual reports remains the exception rather than the rule. "Consistent and comprehensive disclosure frameworks are important to the incentives shareholders provide to corporate managers to deploy capital efficiently," said Richard Samans, Managing Director of the World Economic Forum. Speaking of the initiative, Carbon Disclosure Project Chairman James Cameron said, "We feel it is well timed and can leverage the standardized voluntary carbon disclosure the Carbon Disclosure Project has achieved - most recently on behalf of 225 institutional investors with US$ 31 trillion of assets who engaged with 2,100 corporations - in a formalized, disclosure process".

An advisory committee is being formed that will include industrial, financial services and accounting firms as well as other key stakeholders. In preparation, CDSB members met in Davos with representatives of Alcan; American International Group; Capital Group; Duke Energy Corporation; Ernst and Young; Royal Dutch/Shell; JP Morgan Chase; PricewaterhouseCoopers; SUN Group; Swiss Re and Tokyo Electric Power as well as UK Environment Minister Milliband; California Assembly Speaker Fabian Nunez; and United Nations Environment Programme Director General Achim Steiner.

Resuscitating Doha

During the summit, World Trade Organization (WTO) Director-General Pascal Lamy announced that the stalled Doha Round trade negotiations had been given a new impetus by talks between ministers from 30 countries. Kamal Nath, Minister of Commerce and Industry of India, declared: "Despite the cold outside in Davos, we have been able to defreeze the talks that were frozen." Both were speaking at a session on trade just a few hours after the ministers had agreed to relaunch negotiations suspended last July because of strong disagreements between developed and developing countries, and between the European Union and the United States, on how far agricultural subsidies and tariffs on industrial goods should be cut.

"Today’s ministerial meeting has put quite a lot of energy into the notion that the landing zone is in sight," said Lamy. He added that he will return to Geneva to oversee fresh Round discussions at negotiator level and call ministers together again when enough progress has been made. But he will only do that if and when the right moment has come. "It won’t be tomorrow," he said.

Much will depend, however, on how the developed countries move forward. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva of Brazil called on the international business community to lobby leaders of rich countries to make concessions in the Doha Round of negotiations for a world trade agreement. "If we want to give a signal to the poorest countries that they will have a chance in the 21st century, the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Germany must make concessions," he said. "The United States must reduce its agricultural subsidies, and Europe must ease access for agricultural products."

Other Priorities

Among other priorities that are very much part of SustainAbility’s agenda were human rights (which I address through my role on the Board of Trustees of the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre, though this didn’t get quite the profile this year) and bribery corruption (which I encounter as an issue in my role as Chairman of the Advisory Council of the UK Export Credits Guarantee Department). This year, the heads of the Big Four Accounting firms (Deloitte, Ernst & Young, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers) agreed to work with the WEF Partnering Against Corruption Initiative (PACI) to support the global fight against corruption. Together, PACI and the accounting firms will explore the development of a framework for companies to benefit from independent reviews of their anti-bribery programmes.

In parallel, the Presidents of the World Bank, the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the Executive Director of the international Finance Corporation reaffirmed their support of the PACI and recognized the important role the private sector plays in guiding policy and assisting governments in reducing corruption. They have agreed to jointly pilot an country-specific anti-corruption implementation programme, and a sector-specific structural reform that will promote fair competition and transparency.

With China increasingly active in Africa, there was some discussion of what could be done to rein in such countries as they become more influential—and potentially undermine international and regional transparency initiatives. But one of the most upbeat set of conversations I had was with various people from the Indian software company Infosys (http://www.infosys.com/), which I am hoping to visit in Bangalore in February, around a futures session I am due to do for Shell there. Infosys aims to “win in a flat world,” but do so in ethically acceptable ways. Am very much looking forward to visiting them and some of the social entrepreneurs and NGOs in the area.

Whatever Shell concludes in its session on the prospects for technology out to 2030, the 2007 Schwab and World Economic Forum Summits have underscored the fact that new actors are surging into the playing-field - and, in the process, the game we are changing is very likely to change profoundly.

Skoll awardee Ceres (http://www.ceres.org/news/news_item.php?nid=166) and Calvert have released a new report, Climate Risk Disclosure by the S&P 500. This is the first analysis of climate disclosure practices among the 500 largest U.S. companies. The full text of the new report is available for free downloading at www.ceres.org

The report concludes that America’s largest companies still are not taking climate change seriously enough. Less than half (47 percent) of the S&P 500 companies responded to a global survey last year by the Carbon Disclosure Project requesting information about their climate risks and strategies, and those that did respond failed to provide much of the information investors are seeking. Nearly a third (30 percent) of the responders, in fact, declined to publicly release their responses, calling them “confidential.”

Other key findings from the Ceres/Calvert report include:

Poor Greenhouse Gas Emissions Management: 80 percent of the 228 companies that responded to the survey (182 companies) addressed the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, but only a quarter (59 companies) disclosed measurable emissions reductions targets and specific time frames for reductions.

Physical Impacts Not on Radar Screen: Nearly 75 percent of the responding companies (171 companies) acknowledged bottom-line risks associated with extreme weather events such as hurricanes, fires and floods. However, very few of the companies surveyed link more-extreme weather to climate change and fewer still—only four percent – disclosed strategies for mitigating and adapting to the growing physical impacts from climate change.

The Ceres/Calvert analysis was based on S&P 500 company responses to a questionnaire distributed last year by the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP), to obtain more information relating to corporate management of climate change. CDP is a coordinated effort by 225 global investors with total assets of $31 trillion. The report authors used the Global Framework for Climate Risk Disclosure to analyze the quality of responses.

More information from: Chris Fox, Director of Investor Programs, Ceres, 99 Chauncy Street, Boston, MA 02111, USA or on +1 617-247-0700 x15. Email: fox@ceres.org. Ceres website (www.ceres.org). Investor Network on Climate Risk website (www.incr.com).

Social entrepreneurs - a.k.a. social capitalists - are being invited to put themselves "on the map." Xigi is a new "global landscaping tool" for the capital market that invests in social enterprise, microfinance, community development, fair trade and related areas. More details at http://www.xigi.net/. This fascinating venture involves people like Mark Beam, Kevin Jones, Tim Freundlich and Sara Olsen, and has attracted support from the likes of the Lemelson Foundation, RSF, Tangle Capital, Good Capital, Omidyar Network, SVT Group, Collective Intelligence, and Calvert Social Investment Foundation.

To spark meaningful conversations about social entrepreneurship, we have invited (and continue to invite) feedback from our various networks. A recent response provided a welcome reality check for our team. As John heads off to the Fast Company awards in New York this week, we want to recognize that there are many social entrepreneurs who haven't yet made it to the podium and some who never will. Their work, still, remains essential to driving entrepreneurial solutions to sustainability challenges.

Below are the words of LAURA PETERSON, FOUNDER, HANDS TO HEARTS INTERNATIONAL . Thanks, Laura for your honest words and continued courage.

I think right now there is a ton of hype around social entrepreneurs, there are pros and cons to this, but the reality is that very few SEs will ever get off the ground. I am a therapist, a supervisor and an administrator, now people call me a "social entrepreneur", but I grapple with that. I have described myself as a "business woman trapped inside the body of a humanitarian - and I cannot get out!"

I am either exceedingly brilliant or radically stupid. Two years ago I up and quit my secure job (where I was credentialed, respected, appreciated and well paid) to start Hands to Hearts International (HHI), but I have no "street cred" as a social entrepreneur - people question my motives, and I am not known in the field.

I do receive respect, mostly because of my courage to just take off and do something radical. I certainly do not consider myself an expert on social entrepreneurship. I am a woman, who got too tired of seeing too many kids, too broken, too early, knowing that it was all preventable. I have been given the chance to try out my radically simple idea of empowering women and nurturing children, all owned and applied within local communities in developing countries. I do not consider myself well trained on how to literally change the world…but maybe I am doing it anyway.

In our first 8 months of operations HHI led 12 trainings in 2 countries, for over 17 orphanages, for 205 impoverished women, who are improving the health and care for more than 1,100 orphaned infants. And we did this with peanut-level-funding! The results are apparently beyond anyone's expectations. Children are healthier, have fewer trips to the hospital, need less medicine, gain more weight, and are easier to soothe. The local women caregivers are more responsive to the children, practice better hygiene, take greater pride in their work and for some, HHI has given them their first jobs ever!

Meanwhile I am scrapping everyday to glean little bits of funding and still do 1-2 other jobs to be able to afford health insurance and basic living expenses. When people want to see a pic of me at work, I want to send them a pic of me curled up over my laptop, crafting the 13th grant proposal in the last 3 weeks (literally). This is in between keeping in touch with supporters, drafting contracts with partners, trying to graciously coordinate volunteers who generously manage our website and database, create graphics, fundraising events, host events, create budget forecasts, do bookkeeping, etc.

I am apparently not developed enough for one fellowship program, while I may be too developed for another. I cannot accurately demonstrate "best practices", as that requires research and that means you can afford research to show how "best" your "practice" is. To apply for major grants I need to pony-up $2k to get a financial audit, which is approximately a third of our current assets! All the while I try to hold the pieces together to actually make our project happen on a day to day basis for the women and children - the entire reason I started this whole thing.

My "idea" is actually working, and it is having unimaginable results! But my venture could still die on the vine. No SE is an island, and so many others must join in - the masses, the $$$, the brains, the media, the web-diva, database-dude and the on-ground, real women and children we are trying so damn hard to lift up. We all must rise up, get rowdy, demand more and refuse to remain silent!

I do believe that SE's are the next wave, but this all needs to be taken in stride. Some of us will rise, some will fade, and it isn't necessarily due to our brilliance or efficiency. We can offer new slants, new perspectives and ridiculous tenacity to our missions. Some of us may even truly change the world, maybe I already have, but while my model is designed to reach financial sustainability in a few years, currently how I am operating now is not sustainable. I think one of the critical traits of a SE is naivete. While SEs are becoming the "media darlings" the systems are still a far way behind in supporting us.

Since joining SustainAbility in September, I've come to appreciate the importance of our 'sofa'. More than just a couple of much loved couches in our common space, the sofas at SustainAbility are about creating conversations in a comfortable setting and seeing what emerges.

This week, Becky Buell, from Oxfam livened up our sofa. Becky wanted to share lessons about how large organizations innovate and posed an interesting question about social entrepreneurs -- complementary or competitive? As NGOs constantly strive to innovate in fundraising, are they engaged in a losing battle with social entrepreneurs - the new charity industry darlings? What risk does a potential shift away from the tried and true pose to society? Or can these relationships be more complementary? As Sophia Tickell noted (see 29 November posting), can the pursuit of partnerships between NGOs and social entrepreneurs help all ships rise together?

Hating reality TV as much as I do, I approached the beginning of Channel 4's The Secret Millionaire series this evening not only with with trepidation but with a real sense of guilt. The producers are apparently bracing themselves for charges of 'poverty tourism,' because the dramatic energy of the programmes comes from millionaires going undercover into poor communities and working out who to bankroll in building new ventures.

But as the programme tracked the journey of discovery of multi-millionaire Ben Way of The Rainmakers (http://www.makingrain.com/main/index.html) in a massively disadvantaged community in the London borough of Hackney, my brain had switched on. And by the time Way was handing out cheques to a socially-minded black boxer, a young black designer and a youth club, despite the fact that the TV company involved was also responsible for the Wife Swap series, I had concluded that this was some of the most powerful, moving television I have ever watched.

So, the website's up and running. It's very exciting. I am hoping that it will give us the chance to explore what's new about the social enterprise space, and importantly, what's not so new.

When I was first introduced to a range of deeply impressive social entrepreneurs who were tackling fiendish challenges with the same dogged determination that surrounds a child learning to walk, I was, of course, impressed and awed. But I also felt at home. I have met the same cussed and committed individuals throughout my career and the field of international development is full of them. And through the decades during which that discipline has evolved many lessons have been learnt and successes achieved. I hope very much that some of these, the good, the bad and ugly can be shared so that the wheel is refined and improved, rather than being remade.

Sophia

Leapfrogging is something most of us did as children, then dropped from the skill-set we discussed with potential employers and working partners in later life. Yet the art - and science - of leapfrogging is going to be central to the process of jumping our unsustainable economies, industries and business models to more sustainable states. Hence the labeling of our blog on our ongoing thinking and work around social entrepreneurship, innovation and scalable solutions.

To date, SustainAbility has mainly focused on large, multinational companies and their supply chains. If such organizations change their thinking and priorities, the reasoning goes, the changes can cascade through market relationships to their suppliers. When Wal+Mart switches on, for example, there are huge implications for that company's 61,000 vendors. But experience shows that it can be very tough to get such large incumbents to jump into new opportunity spaces. And that's where our internal Leapfrog Project fits in.

In the first year of our Skoll Foundation-funded 3-year program on social innovation and entrepreneurial solutions, a key action item is to work out how to leapfrog our team, our wider network, our clients and - ultimately - our business model into high-leverage relationships with innovators, entrepreneurs and funders who are working towards systemic change.

The leapfrogging idea surfaced a few years back, when Pamela Hartigan and I were starting out on our book odyssey, but the idea of using LEAPFROGS as the title went on the spike when Brazilian author Paulo Coelho - a member of the Schwab Foundation board - said the concept didn't translate into Portuguese and other languages. Paulo, a best-selling author, knows what he's talking about, and when we talked to a German colleague, Tell, he couldn't think of the German phrase for leapfrog either. But, even in our globalizing world, this is too powerful a concept to lose because it doesn't translate - or at least not yet.

Turn to Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leapfrogging) and the concept of leapfrogging is defined as "a theory of development in which developing countries skip inferior, less efficient, more expensive or more polluting technologies and industries and move directly to more advanced ones. A frequent example is countries which move directly from having no telephones to having cellular phones, skipping the stage of landline telephones altogether."

We plan to use the term more broadly - referring to the ability of innovators, entrepreneurs, business models, corporations, value chains and even entire economies to make big leaps towards sustainability - or to jump into totally new opportunity spaces.

One longer term ambition will be to work out - in each of the six key sectors SustainAbility focuses on - what the most promising leapfrogging ideas and approaches are, how they have worked to date, and what needs to be done to ensure they are replicated and brought to scale. We are very interested to hear from others working on similar approaches, whether in the sustainable development area or in other areas.

Today marks the official launch of the Skoll Program website, which I had great pleasure in being a part of. My role - dubbed 'web goddess' by the Skoll Program Team - included that of sourcing imagery, plugging in content and generally orchestrating the interplay between the SustainAbility/Skoll Team and Craig (Ray) of Origin Creative who is behind the design of the website as a whole.

Your say....
Going forward, our hope is that the Skoll Program website will make a deep impression on all those who set sail in it. Yet, we are very much open to learning new tricks and ways of seeing the issues on our site, and would therefore like to encourage you to send us feedback, comments or suggestions you might have on how we are joining the dots. Please send these to me (Kelly Cruickshank) at cruickshank@sustainability.com

Look out for....
Periodically, we intend to post statistical data (promise to make it interesting) on how the Skoll Program website is being received across the globe; bringing in those much needed reality checks.

Before landing in London, I was exploring the world of social entrepreneurship in Portland, Oregon (home of the bottle bill, the urban growth boundary and Nike). Through Young Women Social Entrepreneurs, I connected with some amazing individuals committed to making a difference. The group, which originated in San Francisco, is a motley crew and includes strategy professionals, designers, health care workers, bankers and a variety of other women looking to make the leap or who have already leapt. The power of the network, of being inspired by others' willingness to take risks is incredible. A few notable ventures to emerge from YWSE include: Hands to Hearts International, Lucina Company and Souk LLC.

I met earlier this week with Bob Adams from Ideo in their splendid office space overlooking the San Francisco bay. Bob and I chatted about Ideo's recent foray into the sustainability arena. He described how design is evolving from design for design's sake, to design for business to an emerging focus on design for sustainability.

We talked about 'design thinking', the notion that design is broader than aesthetics or product development; it is a way of thinking, a process for transformative innovation. The resulting creativity (or creative destruction) is what's celebrated about the world of social entrepreneurship. Not surprisingly, the 2007 Skoll World Forum, is tapping the design talent of Ideo to help craft the agenda around 'social innovation and diffusion'.

One of the most interesting social enterprises we have come across is Endeavor (http://www.endeavor.org). When Sophia (Tickell), Sam (Lakha) and I dropped in on them in New York last week, co-Founder and CEO Linda Rottenberg gave us copies of their latest impact report, covering the period 2005-2006. Have been holding tightly onto my copy ever since, not least because one of the things SustainAbility has to do is to develop an updated set of impact metrics, something that has become even more urgent since we began to work in the social entrepreneurship space. And if you haven't seen the Endeavor website, it's one of the most engaging we have seen. Take a look at the way they present their own metrics. Stunning.

Habitat for Humanity http://www.habitat.org/ - has been one of the social enterprises that has impressed me most, not least because of the sheer scale of the self-help housing programs it has operated in the US and around the world. But scale can bring new problems, or at least make them more visible. First there was a sex scandal and now BusinessWeek is having a go, its critique in its November 20 edition titled 'Habitat for Hustlers'. The argument is that banks, brokers and mortgage service companies are exploiting those who Habitat for Humanity has helped, many of whom are financially naive. It will be interesting to see how habitat reacts: most social enterprises have yet to develop the sophisticated crisis management processes found in the big business sector.

For more, http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_47/b4010059.htm?chan=search

While we were all in the US last week, David Miliband (UK Secretary of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs) launched the Government's Social Enterprise Action Plan, subtitled 'Scaling new heights'. He noted that there are "at least 55,000 social enterprises in the UK, generating more than £27 billion turnover and contributing more than £8 billion to GDP a year.

The Action Plan commits the Government to:

1. Foster a culture of social enterprise, by building the evidence and raising awareness of the impact of social enterprise, and promoting successful role models to attract new entrants, customers, financiers and support providers.
2. Ensure that the right information and advice are available to those running social enterprises so that they can gain access to appropriate support to maximise their business performance and, in turn, their social impact.
3. Enable social enterprises to access appropriate finance, by tackling barriers that might prevent investors from supporting social enterprises, or social enterprises from seeking financial support.
4. Help social enterprises to work with Government, ensuring that policy makers and commissioners are aware of the role they can play.

For more details, see http://www.theyworkforyou.com/wms/?id=2006-11-16a.1WS.6

Are current definitions of social entrepreneurship too restrictive, the modern equivalent of whalebone corsets? A new book suggests that the answer might just be - squeeze it out - yes. The book is 'Research on Social Entrepreneurship: Understanding and Contributing to an Emerging Field', a volume of research papers edited by the Aspen Institute's Rachel Mosher-Williams and published by the Association for Research on Nonprofit Organizations and Voluntary Action (ARNOVA: see http://www.arnova.org/new_volume.php), with funding from the UPS Foundation. In his chapter, Paul Light of New York University offers and dissects a revised definition of a social entrepreneur: "an individual, group, network, organization or alliance of organizations that seeks sustainable, large-scale change through pattern-breaking ideas in what governments, nonprofits, and businesses do to address significant social problems."

Haven't yet met - but have heard (and now read) - John Wood, founder of Room to Read. So picked up a copy of his book 'Leaving Microsoft to Change the World' (Collins, 2006) when I was racing through Atlanta, after my flight to Detroit was diverted by a major storm that disrupted flights in and out of Dulles airport. As an absolute glutton for books and reading since early childhood, the idea that people would grow up without access to these extraordinary windows into the wider world is literally shocking. But John Wood, winner of a 2004 Skoll Award (http://www.skollfoundation.org/grantees/socialentrepreneurship/2004.asp), didn't just sit there feeling shocked.


While working as Microsoft's director of business development for the Greater China region, Wood decided to switch onto a new set of rails - helping break the cycle of poverty through the lifelong gift of education. In 2000, he founded Room to Read, a nonprofit that promotes literacy in Nepal, India, Sri Lanka, Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and - soon - in Africa. At the time of writing, Room to Read had donated more than 1.2 million books, established more than 2,600 libraries and 200 schools, and sent 1,700 girls to school on scholarship - touching the lives of an estimated 875,000 children. To date.

A must-read book. For more, visit http://www.roomtoread.org. Read the book first, but it's very much in the spirit of the emerging order that Wood gives his email address in the Acknowledgements section of the book: wood@roomtoread.org.

Trawling through the magazine racks in Dulles airport last week, my eye alighted on the latest issue (November 2006) of Inc. Magazine - which sports the 'Do Good, Get Rich' line on its cover and features 50 leading companies pursuing what it dubs the 'Eco Advantage.' Fascinating. For further info, see http://www.inc.com/magazine/20061101/green50_intro.html