As a relative neophyte to the social entrepreneurship movement, I often find myself asking questions through the lens of a Silicon Valley "parallel entrepreneur." These days, many life sciences and clean tech entrepreneurs complain that most VC and angel funding goes to the software, internet, digital, and mobile technology enterprises....

It's easy to identify financial-first enterprises that have scaled to a truly global level in many sectors: soft drinks (Coke, Pepsi), financial services (HSBC), petroleum-based fuels (Royal Dutch/Shell), consumer products (P&G), mobile phones (Samsung, Nokia, Apple), etc.; the list goes on with products and services reaching billions. But there are...

As its many supporters well know, the Grameen Bank's name bespeaks its Bangladeshi roots; Gram is a Bengali word meaning "rural" or "village," and ever since its founding in 1983 by the Bangladeshi banker, economist and Nobel Peace Prize recipient Muhammad Yunus, the non-profit microfinance organization, an early...

In his seminal 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma, the Rhodes Scholar and Harvard business school professor Clayton Christensen coined the term "disruptive technology" to describe the process by which a product or service introduced at the bottom of a market could, through increased affordability, convenience, or ease of use, turn...

Forty years ago next month, Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi presciently told those gathered in Stockholm for the United Nations' first major conference on the environment that "poverty is the worst form of pollution." Citing the indiscriminate use of firewood for fuel, which had decimated India's forests and denuded the...

At the Center for Science, Technology, and Society, we focus on helping social entrepreneurs build ventures that scale. My colleague and mentor Jim Koch, founder of the Center and one of the founders of both our signature Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI) and The Tech Awards,...

The 2012 Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI) cohort was announced on Wednesday, April 18. These 20 social entrepreneurs comprise the 10th annual class of our unique capacity-development program. The Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara University provides each entrepreneur fully subsidized Silicon Valley mentoring, MBA-caliber...

To the extent that I was raised, it was pretty much without religion in the institutional sense. So one might accurately call it a leap of faith when I came to Santa Clara University to lead the Center for Science, Technology, and Society in late 2010. The Center's...

We have just selected and will soon announce the 10th Global Social Benefit Incubator (GSBI™) cohort. The GSBI helps field-based social entrepreneurs build sustainable and scalable ventures that deliver essential goods and services to poor communities around the world such as safe drinking water, off-grid clean energy, access...