Women and Microcredit. Photo sourced from www.pepbonet.com

Firstly, I believe it is important to define social entrepreneurship and the Arc Initiative. The Skoll World Forum defines social entrepreneurs as “society’s change agents, creators of innovations that disrupt the status quo and transform our world.” The key here is that social entrepreneurs take the initiative instead of passively reacting to events. The Arc Initiative capitalizes on potential and amplifies the impact of individuals in their communities by “Exchanging Skills,” “Building Capacity,” and “Generating Ideas.” These are all long-term development plans that are different from what the UN does. Sauder student Arielle Uwonkunda spoke to Professor Jeff Kroeker “about non-profits that have donated money to Rwanda following the war but didn’t make a lasting impact,” and social entrepreneurship solves this problem that charity did not. Most of the entrepreneurs are locals and they are familiar with the problems in their community and what needs to be done to solve them. In the example of Salem’s Boutique, as a woman living in Ethiopia, Salam Kassahun is more familiar with the specific needs of marginalized women than, for example, UN workers. Arc’s role is to give these entrepreneurs the skills and resources to innovative the best solution, but in the end it is still a grass-root initiative. Social entrepreneurship removes the ‘us vs. them’ complex and inspires from the bottom up, instead of distributing band-aids from the top down.

Sourced from David Murdico’s LinkedIn page.

In the article “3 Traps That Block Corporate Transformation”, Vineet Nayar discusses how companies have modernized their way of achieving success and what I found surprised me.

Nayar points out that the success recipe used to be “Innovative Ideas + Cheaper/Faster/Better Execution + Powerful Leadership”, but the current recipe is “Innovative Ideas + Delivering Unique Experiences + Enabling Leadership.” One example of the original Cheaper/Faster/Better Execution is Dell’s virtual integration, as we learned in Operations. But as information technology advanced and became an industry in its own right, companies do not have to individually invest in their own IT department and can instead outsource and specialize in their actual business. An example of this can be found in the article ‘Google Joins a Heavyweight Competition in Cloud Computing’ where Quentin Hardy introduces companies such as Google and Amazon’s role in providing corporations access to otherwise expensive computing technology. The modern role of IT in business was introduced in Performance Management and BTM, and the changes that outsourcing brought to companies was generalized in the article. I think this shift in the success recipe really clicked for me when I considered the Business Model Canvas. How I interpret the change is that Execution shifted from being a Value Proposition to something such as Key Resources or Activities and in its place, more emphasis was placed on the client-centric contents of the Value Proposition Canvas.

Sourced from Stuart McMillen

We sell resources at their extraction cost rather than their replacement value

We have seen leading businesses spectacularly reinvent their practices, but are told to give concessions to the laggards that resist change.

We maintain perverse government subsidies that contradict and counteract government policy.

We are no longer living off of nature’s interest, we are liquidating its capital.

We must rewrite the values of our economy and incorporate the full cost of decisions.

We must eliminate industrial toxins by design so that containment and disposal are no longer necessary.

The quotations above are a partial transcript of the comic “Part of Nature” by Stuart McMillen. The full comic strip explores the relationship between our physical environment and capitalism and I found some of the claims to be unusual.

Sourced from www.chess-llc.com

The comic focuses on anthropogenic impacts on the environment and the corporate role in environmental degradation. I find it interesting that the artist did not condemn capitalism, or corporations specifically, for creating the problem. Rather, he acknowledges businesses as innovators. In one of the tutorials, a classmate mentioned that businesses are essential in creating sustainability because they have an incredible amount of power and capital to create change. I agree that businesses are much more finely attuned to what consumers prioritize, more so than governments that react to social change very slowly through policies. I think that if businesses can reform operations to eliminate waste every step of the way, it would also create economic and social benefits. Businesses in the long-term would reduce cost and improve living conditions for people who are most directly impacted by pollution and climate change. The idea of the triple bottom line is that we do not have to compromise any of the environmental, social or economical profits for the others. Sustainability is possible and immediately necessary.