Just a few weeks ago — Feb 11-15th — I had the great opportunity to join fellow social innovators from around the world at the 2010 StartingBloc Social Innovation Institute in Boston. I absolutely love attending events such as this (including GES, SOCAP, The Feast, and the upcoming SVC/SE Conferences). It’s a rare opportunity for like-minded entrepreneurs, intrapreneuers, and social-change enthusiasts to come together and share passions, ideas, and talents/resources. StartingBloc has done a great job recently in carving out a nice market in the field focused on not only students, but young-professionals in the field as well (serving as the middle-ground between GES and SOCAP).

The Institute was broken down into several components: Speakers, a Social Innovation Competition, and an “Ideas Marketplace” pitch competition.

The Speakers

The lineup of speakers included:

Houston Spencer – an inspirational speaker who I unfortunately missed on the first day due to travel failure, but really enjoyed hearing him speak a few days later about unconventional leadership and staying motivated in the field of social change.

Scott Sherman – One of the most excited and energetic people I’ve ever met whose Transformative Action Institute is spreading to colleges and universities across the world “training a new generation of social entrepreneurs, innovators, visionaries, and problem-solvers for the 21st century.” Scott’s presence alone is enough to get you out of your seat and want to change the world, and I had an awesome opportunity to chat with him on the second morning as we took the bus to Tufts.

Bob Tomasko – A professor at American University that I never had the opportunity to meet while I was there, but who is passionate about social enterprise and corporate social responsibility and integrating this into the curriculum. He has an extensive background consulting for companies like Coca-Cola, Ford, Mariott, and Toyota. I can’t wait to continue talking with Bob once I move back to DC!

Corey Szopinski – A social media guru who shared social media strategies for social change. Corey has been involved with developing interactive marketing initiatives for brands among the likes of Coca-Cola, Anheuser Busch, Volkswagon, Virgin Atlantic, and the Nelson Mandela Foundation. His company, Core Industries, brings “award winning interactive marketing to organizations that are leading the green economy and that focus on the triple bottom line: people planet and profit.”

Tom Szaky – An entrepreneur I’ve been hearing a lot of lately — the co-founder of TerraCycle — talked “trash” at StartingBloc. It was actually very interesting hearing him talk about some of the legal challenges TerraCycle has faced in reusing a product like an old Coke bottle as a container for another re-branded product because Coke owns the patent on the shape of the bottle! He shared some interesting insight between “little guy” vs. “big guy” battles that can come with entrepreneurship and the need for legal protections that can support innovation and keep “big guy” companies from holding-up startups in court. Plus, TerraCycle is a very interesting case study of a social startup!

Jeff Chapin – Probably has the coolest job in the world as a “Social Impact Designer” for IDEO. Jeff provided awesome insight into the product design process, particularly BOP-focused design. He shared some projects he’s worked on with IDEO around the world, and I think inspired a lot of to either pursue design-focused careers or at least focus more attention on design approaches to problem solving.

Patrick Meier – A member of the Ushahidi team, Patrick shared an awesome overview of Ushahidi and its involvement in the recovery effort of Haiti. It was really amazing seeing pictures and video “behind the scenes” of the massive volunteer effort of people tracking down information across the web and mapping it on the database. Text messages, tweets, news reports were all dissected to get accurate information to rescue teams on-the-ground. I think everybody in the room was just in awe and inspired by the massive undertaking and work that Ushahidi and the teams of volunteers managed to do in the wake of one of the largest crises of our lifetime (so far).

Dan Pallotta – Author of the book Uncharitable, Dan talked about how the way that we measure and perceive how nonprofits should run dramatically impacts their effectiveness. High overhead and compensation packages are not necessarily bad or signs of corruption — especially when you compare them head-to-head with the budgets and salaries of private-sector companies. We need to move beyond these misconceptions of the social sector and provide them with the tools they need to maximize impact. This involves developing more results-oriented metrics that do not punish charities for running more like businesses. This is something that I’m very interested in and hope to talk more with Dan about.

Colette Stanzler – Building off the need for more results-oriented metrics, Colette shared how her organization — Root Cause — approaches building a social impact market that blends the nonprofit, private, and public sectors through cross-sector partnerships and collaboration. A major part of their work is focused on measuring social impact, identifying successful programs, and spreading and scaling those programs effectively through cross-sector partnerships.

Cheryl Kiser – Cheryl shared her experience as a consultant for businesses’ CSR and sustainability initiatives. She is just now settling into her new role as Managing Director of The Lewis Initiative at Babson College.

Ryan Allis – Co-Founder of iContact, Ryan is actually very much engaged in the concept of social entrepreneurship and CSR. Ryan shared how his company has integrated a 1% Time/Product/Equity/Payroll model for its CSR initiatives. Ryan is somebody to keep your eyes on as an emerging player in the social enterprise space. I’m looking forward to seeing where he goes down the road.

Mindy Lubber – Mindy’s work as the President of Ceres is focused on integrating sustainability into the capital markets, encouraging and helping companies outline and publish sustainability initiatives (and ideally metrics as well). Having recently returned from the World Economic Forum in Davos, she told us how sustainability is becoming a more serious and central issue for business leaders — leading top business executives to attend her session at Davos.

Mitchell Wade – Concluding the Institute, Mitchell left us all with a quote that really resonated: The only change that really matters is that which happens after you leave. This is something that’s so important for us to remember as we build organizations or programs around the world focused on sustainability. From the very beginning we need to be focused on training others to build and grow the organization on their own! It seems like common sense, but you’d be surprised by how often this principle is forgotten.

Social Innovation Competition

One of the conference features was an event called the Social Innovation Competition. It was definitely an innovative way to help fund the institute — using the collaborative power of the fellows to serve as a consultancy to a corporate sponsor. I’m not sure how much I can talk about publicly about the client and the strategy we put together, but we put together a cross between a communications strategy and sustainability initiative for a major US corporation with offices around the world. My team had a blast working on the project, and actually made it to the final round!

Ideas Marketplace

This aspect of the conference allowed anybody to give a 1-minute pitch about their project or something they were passionate about. It was an awesome opportunity to hear everybody talk about their passions and interests! Three finalists were selected to give a longer pitch. Among the finalists were Maria Springer (Kito International) and Leticia Jauregui (CREA).

Final Thoughts

There is a lot of room for StartingBloc to grow as a network of social innovators and as an Institute. It would be nice to see more speakers at a TED-style pace (quick and to the point) as well as more workshops (a la GES).

Where StartingBloc really shines is in attracting an awesome group of fellows that have been vetted through the application process, and developing a strong life-long network connecting like-minded individuals and organizations. This is what attracted me to StartingBloc and was by-far my greatest take-away. As I return to Washington, DC in just a few weeks, I plan on being as active and engaged with this network as possibly by volunteering and helping organize events. Already in the last couple of weeks, I’ve had amazing phone calls and conversations with several fellows. They inspire me with every conversation, and I hope that I can bring some value to their work and their lives. That said, I really look forward to having a continued relationship with the StartingBloc community!

On the day prior to kickoff of the much anticipated StartingBloc conference, Fellows from around the world are finding themselves stranded in airport lounges from Dubai to DC! As a wave of winter weather barrels across the country, flights are being cancelled and roads are slicker than an olympic ice luge! As for me, I left this morning navigating my way through unplowed road to get to a ridiculously slippery I-70 that would take me to the Indianapolis Airport. It took a while to get used to the driving conditions (after I turned my car sideways after first getting on the highway and managed to correct myself). The 70 MPH speed limit let way to a cautionary 30-40 MPH pace. Every few miles there were cars who managed to find themselves in ditches on either side of the road — fortunately I was not one of them…yet!

I successfully arrived at the airport an hour before my flight, pulled into the long-term parking lot only to find that it had not been plowed and parking spots were nothing more than piles of snow up to 4 feet. My first parking attempt led to my car getting stuck halfway. After managing to get out of that situation, I successfully parked in another spot (just missing the shuttle to the airport). When I finally got to the ticket counter, my flight was 20 minutes away from takeoff. Apparently, the computers lock out 30 minutes prior — meaning I was S.O.L!

So now I’m writing to you all from my “headquarters” for the day: Starbucks in the Indy Airport In an effort to mitigate against all risk of missing another flight, I’ll be camping out here until my flight tomorrow at 11AM. It’s been nice — I ended up meeting with my cousin Ben who was flying into town for business. And I’ve managed to get a lot of work and reading done!

For everybody traveling, stay safe and keep your spirits high! All the StaringBloc Fellows, I’ll see you in the days to come as we trickle into Boston from all over the globe!