Also intrigued by the sentence “We have been free to switch from a not-for-profit model to being a social enterprise”. Except that definitions of social enterprise tend to talk about reinvesting profits back into the business….just like most third sector / charity / “non-profit” organisations do to survive and build reserves. Except they tend to call it ’surplus’.

And such an old-fashioned view of CSR: frankly, any business that isn’t incorporating social and environmental concerns (internalising the externalities, as someone put it) into their core strategy in the future is destined to suffer. CSR long since ceased to be about ‘which charity to give money to’. The more forward thinking private-sector organisations know that they need to learn from the third sector because of many converging issues: regulation, (graduate) recruitment, consumer pressure, new ’social’ markets, and so on.

Again, and I’m sure the idea is very exciting…(although if it is a groovy new social networking-related site, as a previous post tends to suggest, it’s one of a coming wave….), seems like an open approach might have helped puncture a few myths, and pin down some detail.

Personally, I’m delighted to read (I stumbled across this post by accident) of these sorts of debates happening at an Economist initiative. Your post also says interesting thing about being ‘entrepreneurial’ within an existing organisation with all its cultures, reputation and process. So I will be intrigued as to the idea that emerges, and wish you the best of luck with it. With such a powerful brand behind you, I’m sure there’s every chance of success.

Matt

Although I don’t have stats to support my claim but I don’t see a lot of ideas pinching from cambrian house’s monthly idea competition (ideaWarz).

I hope your project will do well. I am interested to see how an essentially closed and internally developed system or idea will fair in a Web 2.0 world.

Best of luck,
Kempton