ChangeThinking with SmithMartin

Category: Social Enterprise

Public service co-operators

Moving from the wrap around direct support of the pubic sector and taking services into another social business form can be an amazing journey. It can also be a rocky road fraught with…

Realism in social business development

The short video below tells the story of an organisation and team, in this case, in the technology sector, that burned through 40 million dollars of capital in five years and failed on…

Startup Britain – a useful web resource?

The ‘Startup Britain’ web site has the support of the Prime Minister – but is it, as some commentators have cynically described a government backed web link-farm – offering already available resources to…

Authorities – give away your space?
Become an ideas enterprise…

We were reading an interesting web article about the internet giant AOL and how they had made available, at no charge, the 225,00 square feet of office space they own in Palo Alto…

Creating the right zone

We have been doing a lot of work recently on the creation of good governance structures for a variety of charitable and social enterprise organisations. Policies and process play a large part in…

Time and the social entrepreneur

We are regular readers of Entrepreneur.com – a great source of inspiration, ideas and shared experience for start-ups. Although U.S. based, the site does often contain the stories of UK and European organisations and…

The Start UpToolkit

What is my route to market? Who will buy our product or service? The website thestartuptoolkit.com is a great place to begin pulling together ideas for your new social businesses. Created by Rob…

SMP elementals – an approach

Starting a new project? Starting a social business? Trying to get the enterprise element bootstrapped in your social enterprise? When you are starting energy and enthusiasm are great to get you going. Your…

Entrepreneurship – social or otherwise

Europa have just released the latest 2009 state of entrepreneurship survey – which interestingly shows that 45% of Europeans would like to be their own boss, if they could. The EU survey suggests that entrepreneurs…

Social Enterprise Management
A featured title

Doherty, Foster, Mason et al have produced a great primer for the person intent on mastering the management of social enterprise. Published in 2009 the book Management for Social Enterprise contains a wide ranging…