Natural Innovation .org

During my time in San Francisco I joined the "Hub" and really grew to appreciate the Social Entreprenurs who used its shared working space. It deepened my commitment to the space between charities and businesses.

Charity doesn’t scale to meet the needs of billions, and corporate greed cannot be satisfied by the poorest of the poor, which is why basic human needs remain unmet despite the existence of (technical) solutions, and scaling solutions is one of my passions.

Between these two models lies the emerging area of Social Ventures, where an entity operates like a business, but is driven by a mission rather than only by profit. Social Ventures range from Charities with a business activity, through to Corporations acting responsibility.

It is somewhere in the middle where I believe my ideal model lies, organisations where the mission is crucial to the organisation, and not just an add-on, and where finance is only required to get it going e.g. to for example to create and bring to market a technology, but where the solutions can be provided on a commercially viable basis, because the cost has been dropped to a point where the poor can afford it.

Since I'm focused on the early stages of technology, the question is where the funding will come from, and what the equivalent of venture capital is, in the area of impact investing. I led a session at the excellent SoCap conference on this topic, where I was also interviewed for the Uptake.

I've been on a quest - that started with asking once again, how I could be most effective in making a difference. So here is the story so far ...

I started the journey of creating the Natural Innovation Foundation in November 2009 during a trip to check out some technologies for UES and for a new investment fund I was advising. During the trip, a realisation crystalized that the technologies with the highest potential to impact our planet, and in particularly the billions without adequate supplies of food, clean water & energy were not going to be funded by classical philanthropy because it was averse to risk, especially technical risk, nor would it be funded by venture capital because there was unlikely to be sufficient return because of the poverty of the customers, and in many cases the difficulty of protecting the Intellectual Property.

So I transformed my consultancy, Natural Innovations, to focus on supporting clean technology innovations with high potential impact.

For me personally, its been a challenging 15 months, during which I've only been home (Byron Bay, Australia) for about 8 weeks. This will be the first time in over ten years I'm not home for the solstice / xmas / new-years holiday. But I've enjoyed living in many places, ten countries in all, including reasonably long stints in India, Indonesia, Germany, Portugal, and the US. I really want to thank the people who have opened their homes and hearts to me, especially Brewster & Mary in San Francisco; Rachel, Rob & Johnny in Bali; Nikhil, Tanmayo, Freeman & Mario in India; Wendelin & Khabira in Freiburg & everyone else who lent me a bed along the way.

Several clips of an interview at SoCap10 with Mitra Ardron appear in this video by the Uptake explaining Social Capital and Social Ventures.