CRO Association Our mission is to accelerate the profession of corporate responsibility.
Issue link: http://www.e-digitaleditions.com/i/139175
The BCLC Report cooking fuel can burn up more than 30 percent of a family's income. Enter Prakti and One Earth Designs. The folks at Prakti developed one of the world's first industrial scale personal clean cook-stoves, cheap enough, and durable enough to get wide distribution in the developing world. (See cover story citation TK from two years ago.) One Earth Designs has developed the world's most efficient and durable solar collector, which has multiple applications, but immediate use as a heat source for cook-stoves. Want to open a new business in a developing country? Unlikley, if you're one of the four billion people on the planet who don't have a credit score, which means that most microfinance organizations, much less big banks, won't touch you. Enter Shivani Siroya and InVenture. Shivani and her team have invented "QuickBooks by text message." Most of the world's mobile phone users have only a "feature phone"—the basic flip phone variety, no internet connection or App Store. But it does have SMS messaging, so with InVenture you can text in daily revenues and expenses, and they'll create a basic profit and loss statement for you; over time, a financial identity and a credit score will emerge, so now you can apply for financing. True Cost Altruism All this entrepreneurialism isn't just good for start-ups. It's good for big companies and for the U.S. as a whole. Jeff Hoffman, the founder and former CEO of Priceline, told me, "Entrepreneurship is the new diplomacy. If you're trying to stimulate economies and create jobs, let small business do it." According to Hoffman, "Job growth, innovation, and economic stimulus all come from companies less than five years old." As part of the UnReasonable At Sea program, Hoffman said he has, "...been to almost every continent, and all over the world people are saying 'we've got to enable small business and entrepreneurs," and programs like UnReasonable@State are connecting the major players to make that happen. Hoffman has little time for those who question why America should help grow entrepreneurs in foreign countries. "I did innovation workshops for two Fortune 500 companies in the past few weeks. They are aware of global competition, but they tend to focus on the negative: all the new competitors. They don't automatically focus on the possibility," said Hoffman. "They can now crowdsource engineering challenges to hundreds of engineers worldwide. They can vastly expand their talent base." What's more, he concluded, they also get access to new markets: "If you're not plugged into this wave, you're missing all this creativity, missing all these markets." For big companies such as Microsoft, the benefit comes from creating entire new classes of consumers for their software and services—and in providing valuable experience for their own software developers. "Enabling great ideas to come to market is something we've always done," Kudo Tsunoda, corporate vice president at Microsoft Studios told me. "We figured the best way to help entrepreneurs was to give them the widest lens possible by sending a great team of people across multiple disciplines [to participate in the UnReasonable At Sea program]. . . . So many problems are local. By being on the ground, that's how you develop experiences that do help and have an impact on their lives wherever they are." And, added Tsunoda, the learning goes both ways. "We want our people to get out of Redmond and get out into the world and meet all different types of people, have different experiences. That's the fuel for innovation." Startups as Statecraft For the U.S. as a whole, Assistant Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs Jose Fernandez sees UnReasonable@State as part of the department's whole economic statecraft strategy. "Let me tell you a true story," said Fernandez. "I did a tour of North Africa right before the Arab Spring. You could tell that something was going to happen. A lot of it had to do with youth unemployment and lack of opportunity. We did a tour to foster entrepreneurship and connections between the U.S. and nations in the Maghreb [Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Mauritania] but also within the Maghreb itself. I spoke to a gathering of senior business leaders in Egypt about how we wanted to support them, connect them to create new entrepreneurs, businesses, and business programs at universities. I asked for their thoughts. The group was quiet for a moment. I thought I had lost them. It was a very uncomfortable minute or so. Finally, one of the most senior leaders came forward and held me by the shoulders. 'Mr. Fernandez, this is the America we believe in,' he said." Daniel Epstein, founder of the UnReasonable Institute said, "The really tough challenges the U.S. faces are global anyway." Think about oil spills, pollution, or natural disasters. All these things ignore national boundaries and need global solutions, according to Epstein. Moreover, he added, "Attracting entrepreneurs should be the top policy priority [for the U.S.]." He sees it as a matter of economic survival. "We're still a brain magnet. But we're approaching a tipping point. Some of the best entrepreneurs are outside the U.S., so we need to keep attracting them." If doing good for its own sake was CR 1.0 and "shared value" a la Michael Porter was CR 2.0, these "smart power entrepreneurs" represent CR 3.0. They're creating cross-sector combinations, leveraging support and money from the public, private, and civil sectors to solve big problems while growing shareholder value. In the words of InVenture's Siroya, programs such as UnReasonable@State, funded out of the U.S. international affairs budget, "give a bigger pay-off than if you were to fund us directly. It's a true win-win-win on a global scale—something that works for us [as a private company], helps people abroad, and generates money abroad that we bring back here, creating jobs here in the U.S. People criticize America for declining innovation. But we're creating innovations here, exporting them abroad, and vice versa." Maybe entrepreneurs really are the new diplomats. Got a smart power innovation of your own? Tell me about it: richard.j.crespin@gmail.com. Richard J. Crespin is the CEO of Crespin Enterprises, a senior fellow for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Foundation, and the director of business outreach for the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition. MAY/JUNE 2013 | www.thecro.com [27]