Adventurous news heading your way! Two weeks ago we started developing our pilot for our Adventure Education series in Brazil – a series of adventure documentaries and an education concept about sustainability in general, and about Zero Waste in particular. More information will come, but here is a little sneakpeak of what you can expect. Another hint is to check out our fabolous partner’s website, Destino Azul.

Stay tuned for more information!

Love!

We need your help! We’re initiating a new very exciting fashion up-cycling initiative. The name and other details are still a BIG secret! Nevertheless, we need your help to kick things off!

Tribster and fashion designer Alexandra Pötz is in charge of the design process, and she needs all your shirts and blouses for children and adults that you don’t need any more. All kinds are welcome!

How about that! A great opportunity to clear your wardrobe. (Do you really need all that stuff… :))

If you have something to give away, please contact Alexandra on Facebook or send her an email, alexandra [a] thegoodtribe [dot] com.

Thank you very much for your contribution!

And stay tuned for more info about the initiative :)

Photo: The Good Tribe

The last year, tribsters Michael Bauer-Leeb and Evelina Lundqvist have been conducting research on how to better facilitate a business relationship between social entrepreneurs and business angel.

Now they are looking for opportunities to present their work (in English, German or Swedish!). They would love to talk to other social entrepreneurs as well as entrepreneurs, business angels, banks, and other investors, students, authority officials who want to learn more about the topic, and others who are interested.

Let us know if you know somebody who would be interested in lectures, consulting, keynotes or workshops on the topic!

Some of the topics Evelina and Michael address are:

• What is social entrepreneurship (and why it is so difficult to define), and its role in the currently changing economic paradigms.
• How to enhance communication between social entrepreneurs and investors and increase social entrepreneurs’ chances of finding an investor.
• Differences between social entrepreneurship and entrepreneurship.
• How can my business benefit from including social and environmental, along side profit seeking in the core business.

If you want to know more, download the information sheet (PDF) or read more here.

Any tips are welcome! Thank you :)

The Good Tribe wish you a smashing world changing weekend!

Photo: Rupert Pessl

This Monday (16th of January) we facilitated our first workshop ever in Vienna! Our task was to provide Social Impact Award’s idea generation workshop with our two methods: Sparks (intense and fun getting to know each other) and Vision board (find your professional path in life).

We got great feedback on both methods from the participant. Sparks is like always a hit (it really always works perfectly!), and it was absolutely great to see how hard everyone worked on their vision boards, first silent and smiling and then in vivid discussions.

A big thank you to the participants and the Social Impact Award team for having us! Again to all of you who participated: if you have ideas or questions, please contact us :)

Later this spring, on the 12th and 19th of March to be exact, The Good Tribe will support Social Impact Award with pitch trainings. More information to come!

Photo: Michael Koschutnig

On Monday, 16th of January The Good Tribe co-organize an idea generation workshop with the Social Impact Award team. Our aim is to guide you through the experience of generating ideas to solve social problems. The workshop is open for everyone, and extra super perfect if you want to participate in Social Impact Award competition later this spring. It doesn’t matter if you already have an idea or not, the workshop will take your idea (and your thinking about your future!) to a new level!

If you want to prepare yourself for the workshop, think about the following question: What annoys the hell out of you?

When: Mon, 16.1. 2011, 5pm
Where: The HUB Vienna

Register via Facebook or chaska.armbruster [at] googlemail [dot] com.

From Austria, Brazil and Sweden – we wish you the merriest of Xmases and a perfectly awesome world changing 2012. Take care, and see you next year!

Love,
Gayathri, Evelina, Michael, Sandra and Alexandra

Foto: Rupert Pessl, edited by Pinky Ele

Pinky inspects Michael's sketches of a model of the discursive gap between social entrepreners and business angels. Pinky is The Good Tribe's muse for those of you who are not acquainted yet. Photo: The Good Tribe

Still smoking hot from our intense typing! The Good Tribe’s Xmas gift to all social entrepreneurs, social and commercial business angels, impact and social investors out there, trying to facilitate well working business relationship – a taste of our full master’s thesis… Here’s the executive summary!

Happy reading! 
Michael & Evelina 

- – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – -

We are in the midst of turbulent times, and changing economic and social paradigms. While working on this master’s thesis throughout 2011, we witnessed major breakdowns, revolutions, and changes.

This year began with the Arab Spring, saw the overwhelming earth quake and tsunami catastrophe in Japan that led to a renewal of the discussion of nuclear energy, revisited the economic and financial crisis of 2008 in form of the so-called debt crisis, and gave rise to the critical movement of Occupy Wall Street. Well-known and deeply rooted economic and social paradigms are under scrutiny, theorems and assumptions are questioned by a growing number of people, and every day we read in the news about depleting resources, environmental pollution, climate change, and an ever increasing social gap separating a minority of haves from a growing majority of have-nots.

Social entrepreneurs and business angels – drivers of change and innovation
This increasing number of people, organizations, and institutions from all three major institutional sectors that make up a society, civil society, the state, and businesses, work to resolve the challenges ahead by introducing new ideas and methods. They challenge our common wisdom and reveal promising new perspectives. This study focuses on two of the many actors, which are identified as important drivers of change and innovation: social entrepreneurs and business angels.

Social entrepreneurs – extremely heterogeneous group
Social entrepreneurs conduct a wide range of activities, ranging from activism to social business, and social enterprise to corporate social responsibility. Social entrepreneurs can be described as both a product and a driver of social innovation. They have an important role to play in the current change of economic paradigms since they challenge and disrupt institutions and structures on all levels through offering solutions to social and environmental problems, which other actors cannot or choose not to deal with. Social entrepreneurs comprise a heterogeneous group concerning context they operate in, interests, objectives, paths in life, and educational levels. There are several business model social entrepreneurs can pursue: non-profits with earned income, hybrids, for-profits with a social mission, and traditional non-profits; and form of financing: revenues, loans from commercial and social banks, soft loans, grants and scholarships, donations, venture capital, venture philanthropy, and angel capital and social angel capital.

Business angels invest early stage
Business angels provide high risk capital expecting rather high rates of return. They typically invest in early stages of a company’s life cycle enabling it to fund the development of business concepts, products and services and bring them to market. Business angels can be difficult to approach as they seek privacy and tend to keep a low profile. Business angels are strongly motivated by growing and developing a venture through contributing own experience, network, and time. They derive satisfaction from being involved, setting trends, and participating in the entrepreneurial process. This may be largely owed to the fact that most business angels have been entrepreneurs themselves. Business angels find potential deals usually through personal referrals from informal contacts, such as peer investors or business partners. They screen deals and if found worth the effort, apply intense scrutiny during due diligence, x-raying the entrepreneur and their idea. Only 5% to 12% of projects will lead to closing a deal, but these prove to return financial success in 60% of the cases by employing an exit typically through a trade sale, seldom through going public. Such rates of success make business angels more successful than e.g. formal venture capitalists.

Social entrepreneurship more comprehensive than entrepreneurship
This study identifies factors decisive for facilitating a working and lasting business relationship between social entrepreneurs and business angels. We find that above all other factors trust is paramount. Investing into social ventures, especially in very early stages of the venture’s development cycle means investing into people and their ideas. Though business angels want to see hard facts in a business plan they pay most attention to the person of the social entrepreneur. Their requirements are immense: not only needs the social entrepreneur show excellence in creating social and/or environmental impact, and incorporate so called social qualities like solidarity, cooperation, or selflessness they also need to exhibit a broad set of entrepreneurial qualities, for instance drive, passion, perseverance, a sense of realism, displaying competitiveness and an eye for business. This lets us conclude that social entrepreneurship is more comprehensive then entrepreneurship, adding social and/or environmental impact. This new breed of entrepreneurs is envisioned to command a broad spectrum of capabilities that enable them to balance economic, social, and environmental demands and constraints in order to achieve the best possible result for all stakeholders. Thus we label it “entrepreneurship plus”.

Essential reaching agreement on social and environmental impact and profit 
Adding to the theory of entrepreneurship plus, during the process in which the business angel chooses investees there are many factors specific to social entrepreneurship which can reduce the chances of investment. The social entrepreneur and business angel must reach agreement and similar definitions regarding social and environmental impact, the value of social entrepreneurship, as well as on a level of return on investment and method to measure social and environmental impact. It can be particularly troublesome to reach an agreement on the level of return on investment, since it often is central to the business angel’s perception of the legitimacy of a venture, and of different importance to the social entrepreneur depending on their type of social venture.

Social entrepreneurship – nascent domain in a pre-paradigmatic state
In general there are not many cases known of business angels investing in social entrepreneurs’ ventures. We relate this to a discursive gap between the discourses of business angels and social entrepreneurs. It seems as if the word social tears the discourses apart. The domain of social entrepreneurship is currently in constant flux, and has no clear boundaries, and hence the knowledge about it is limited. Although the phenomenon of social entrepreneurs is not new as it can be tracked back at least 30 years to e.g. the work of Muhammad Yunus and Bill Drayton, who founded the Grameen Bank and Ashoka, respectively, the domain is still to be deemed nascent, and in a pre-paradigmatic state.

Research design
This study follows a qualitative design, exploring the potential business relationship of social entrepreneurs and business angels by analyzing semi-structured interviews conducted with four social entrepreneurs and four business angels active in Austria and Sweden. The participants were selected to represent a sample as heterogeneous as possible in order to attain an image of reality that covers a diverse set of perspectives. We apply social constructivism to interpret the participant’s statements, assuming that our perception of reality is made up of many individual narratives.

This is what Sandra Kinnaman Nordström, our project coordinator for earth.re.create in Sweden says in a newly published article on Supermiljöbloggen. The article discusses how important it is to bring sustainable development into the classroom and to do it in a empowering way. By capturing young people’s ideas and innovative spirit in school and provide good support and skills training to teachers to enable them to stimulate and capture the students’ resources.

Read the full article in Swedish here. Enjoy!

The tribsters in action! Clockwise from upper left: Sandra Kinnaman Nordström, Michael Bauer-Leeb, Evelina Lundqvist, Alexandra Pötz and Gayathri Rathinavelu. Photo: The Good Tribe

Two and a half intense days later we have completed the first international tribster meet-up! This was the first time all five of us met together in a business context. And we had lots to talk about :) We packed the days with getting-to-know-eachother exercises, personal feedback, meaningful conversations, synchronizing business ideas, strategic planning, lots of good food and a fun photo shoot with Rupert Pessl. (Keep an eye open for the amazing photos!)

The Good Tribe has many future strategic moves to make and you can follow some of them here on the blog. We’ll keep you posted! One of the most important insights we had during our conversation was that The Good Tribe’s products aren’t for everyone – they are for brave customers who dare to walk the talk – who dare to create change for real!

Sandra, Alexandra and Michael – thanks again for spending your precious time with us!

Love!
Gayathri and Evelina 

PS. The perfect scenery for the meeting was provided by The Hub Vienna. Be there or be square!

Clockwise from upper-left corner: Pinky Ele meeting his avatar. Taking a break. The Good Tribe's products aren't for everyone - they're for the brave! Discussion about Seth Godin's insight about the dip. Photo: The Good Tribe

It's a regular Wednesday and we are discussing the progress of our thesis and eating peach brownies. But something is not quite what it should be... Photo: The Good Tribe

Today is a nice day at The Hub Vienna. It’s a regular Wednesday and we are discussing the progress of our thesis and eating peach brownies. But something is not quite what it should be. The brownies, the train ride to Vienna, the electricity for powering our computers – all is theft from future generations.

Yesterday was Earth Overshoot Day and from today, through the rest of the year we are living on borrowed resources. Since the mid 1970s we’re using up more than Mother Earth can provide. Globally we’re consuming 1.5 Earths on average each year! This is a sad day, a day that makes us think – and a day of action – because we are moving to slow!

So how are Mother Earth’s limits connected to the master’s thesis on social entrepreneurs, which we are writing? Well, more and more people recognize that we can’t go on like this. They say that we have to start living according to Earth’s limitations. That it’s time for a change, time for business as unusual, time to apply an inclusive and holistic view of the world incorporating social and environmental aspects when conducting business – when leading our lives. Some of these people call themselves social entrepreneurs; they say that they are exercising social entrepreneurship. But what does that mean? And who are they really?

Researchers and practitioners worldwide agree that the terms social entrepreneur and social entrepreneurship are extremely fuzzy and inconsistent. Most of us practitioners have felt the consequences of this fuzz when trying to use these terms to explain what we are doing. As it turns out, few people really know what it is about – and those who do know seem to have radically different views. Some argue that Yunus’s definition of social business is true social entrepreneurship – others argue that the local non-profit activist advocating healthy food, or the small business making a nice profit on up-cycled fashion is the real deal.

Like most social entrepreneurs trying to make the world a better place we were until recently unaware that the various descriptions of Yunus, the activist and the small business are part of a much larger discussion. In fact, they represent different aspects of defining a new paradigm. What we observe is an ongoing struggle between social actors who promote different discourses, and all of them want THEIR definition of social entrepreneurship to become the generally accepted one. One professor, Alex Nicholls, has described these two combating forces as representatives of the American-style hero entrepreneur driven by Ashoka, Acumen fund, Skoll foundation and others vs. the European communitarian, grass-roots entrepreneur represented by various for- and non-profits.

These two movements are trying to control or even manipulate the discourse to gain credibility and justification for their definition by heavily pushing their own narratives. And there are strong indications that the hero entrepreneur with their powerful organizational and financial backing and sophisticated marketing is winning this battle. Aren’t we all sharing success stories and using words like scale, philantro-capitalism, professionals, leadership, result-orientated, pragmatic, risk-taking, visionary and passionate instead of social value, social justice, social change, advocacy, grants, donations, localism, cooperative and third-sector right now? According to Alex Nicholls the latter words are often used by organizations representing the communitarian entrepreneurs and the former are used by organizations representing the hero entrepreneur. A clear sign of combating discourses – which, with all our contributions, eventually will determine a new paradigm of how to live and prosper within the limitations of Earth.

However, in this fragile pre-paradigmatic state we are right now it is important not to rush to conclusions but to discuss and act based on our believes in order to eventually establish a definition together. Thus, letting the hero discourse win the competition of who gets to define the field of social entrepreneurship already now has several serious ramifications. For once, it leads to a narrow and exclusive view of what social entrepreneurship is, excluding aspects, opinions, and ideas presented by others. This narrow and exclusive view is also the result of a process called reflexive isomorphism, which means that you base your view of the world only by looking at yourself. This pattern is typical for fellowship organizations where the organization first defines what social entrepreneurship is, then promotes this view to attract potential fellows who think alike and finally selects fellows based on this view who in turn promote this view further. We arrive at a closed circle of reflection leading to mistake your own output for the feedback from others easily.

Second, a premature definition can lead to being forced to leave beneficiaries without help, since what you do is no longer classified as social entrepreneurship. Thus, you may end up loosing market share, grants, donations or whatever you need to sustain your venture. Third, a premature definition can even lead to the whole field of social entrepreneurship loosing its validity and justification since only a small elite has agreed on the actual meaning of terms. This leaves out and deprives a whole community of grass-roots activists, businesses and programs of labels and legitimacy, and ignores the fact that they practically conduct very similar or even the same things as the elite.

What to do in this tricky situation? How to prevent the discussion from submerging prematurely and leaving us with a definition that might be insufficient, exclusive and not representative for those active in the field? What does Alex Nicholls say? He thinks that adopting a broader view of social innovation could be a way of avoiding getting stuck in the battle between the discourses. He promotes social innovation since it is regarded as a dynamic process, free of prejudice, innovative in contrast to being based on a few success stories only. Taking this view into consideration we could understand social entrepreneurship not as a separate movement or an industry of its own, but as an integral part of both the economy and business pursuing a new paradigm.

Where does this leave us now? First of all, we do like organizations like Ashoka, and we also like heroes. In fact we tremendously appreciate all the great work they and the other not so much known guys and gals in the field do. They are all legitimate and important actors who contribute invaluably to shaping the discourse. Thus, we urge those who have both power and means to shape definitions in the field to not stop listening, to keep an open mind for other perspectives, to embrace discussion, and to develop the field together. And those who feel under-represented and insecure whether they are part of this whole movement to not give up their genuine approaches but to claim their share of the definition.

Back to Mother Earth’s limits again. While we discuss these fundamental issues, the clock is ticking. During the hours it has taken to write this blog entry we have claimed even more resources from our children. Definitions are important for understanding what we are doing and where we are going – but action is even more important to save Mother Earth and ourselves – isn’t it?

Michael Bauer-Leeb and Evelina Lundqvist

Since the mid 1970s we're using up more than Mother Earth can provide. Globally we're consuming 1.5 Earths on average each year! Photo: The Good Tribe