Right now two Nordic companies have launched competitions for social entrepreneurs where the price is an investment in the winning idea(s)! That is in itself super-cool! But if you ask me I think one of these competitions is a joke…

The good news is that Nokia’s competition, the Growth Economy Venture Challenge, is super-inspiring and open for a world of ideas. Basically the only restrictions that Nokia are giving are that you need an idea that incorporates a super-simple mobile phone (duh…) and that the idea should enhance life for people in communities where the average daily income is less than $5. Other than that you can come up with ideas to treat illness and save lives, enhance business, educate, organize communities or whatever quality of life enhancement you can think of.

The price? A $1 000 000 investment in your idea!
(Requested stake in the idea is not stated.)

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The “bad news” then?
Well, it is not really bad; it is just really lame… Kinnevik’s competition, Playing for Change, is a social venture competition with 8 winners and that is really cool! All 8 will receive 1-3 years of personal income, access to Kinnevik’s network and business professionals and a desk at their social business incubator, etc. Nice!

But, here’s the lame part: You may only enter the competition with an idea that supports kids’ rights to play.

Is that lame? Yes, that is LAME!

Because that is restricting YOU, a possible future social entrepreneur, to start your career at a very low priority level in the world of social problems and needs. Let’s just say that we kept the restriction to kids and changed it to: “improve social conditions for children”. Below are some facts to consider:

• Today, and in fact any other day, 16 000 children die from hunger-related issues.
• Rotavirus and pneumonia is killing 9 000 children every day.
• Another 3 000 kids die of malaria today, tomorrow and the day after that…
• All in all a total of 25 000 children die every day as an effect of poor social conditions that we can solve with entrepreneurship and solidarity.

Don’t you think that those kids would rather live than die playing?

Here’s another fact to think about:

• 100+ million children do not have access to education.

If they could choose between the right to play and the right to learn, what do you think would be their choice?

It gets worse though… As I read through the competition’s proposition I find this statement:

“We are looking for you that have an idea to enhance the world for Swedish children and youth…” (translated by me)

“the world for Swedish children”??? On top of the lameness above Kinnevik wants you to call yourself a social entrepreneur and submit ideas to help children play in the world’s 15^th richest country (and no. 1 on Save the Children’s “Children’s Index Rank“). COME ON!?

Strangely enough I think that the description of social entrepreneurship on Playing for Change’s website is very striking and well thought through:

“A social entrepreneur is a person with innovative solutions to society’s most fundamental social problems. They are ambitious and persistent persons who address the most important and most critical social issues and find new ideas for radical social change.” (translated by me)

That is a great definition of the social entrepreneur even though I think it lacks some business focus and it also fails to include people that indirectly work for social change by creating tools for whole communities to do good (kind of what I do). Now, is Swedish kids’ access to play a “fundamental social problem” or one of “the most important and most critical social issues”? If your answer is YES I’d die to hear it!

Kinnevik, you should take a look at Nokia’s excellent initiative to inspire social ventures and really think through your strategy when you start schooling the Swedes in the art of social entrepreneurship (which I think in itself is GREAT). It is serious business and you have the power to set the level of that seriousness. Unfortunately, the level of social importance you have set for “Swedish Social Entrepreneurs” and their ideas, by making Playing for Change the biggest endorsement of social entrepreneurship in Sweden ever, is a joke…

Final note: I think that kids’ play as a TOOL for social entrepreneurs to carry out their missions is great! Around the globe children are educated, organized, inspired and probably treated for illnesses by incorporating play into their lives. Even in Sweden I think social ventures giving refugee kids or handicapped children etc. access to play would be cool. If play is used by social entrepreneurs around the world let it be AS MEANS to save lives, educate the uneducated or give hope to those that have none.

Nokia – #rules

Kinnevik – #fail (please try again!)

Greenhouse gas is not worth anything, it’s simply waste. But, as with any waste – once it piles up in tons and tons and tons it becomes a threat to the producers of the waste. And around the waste a market for waste management starts to grow.

Greenhouse gas, and CO2 in particular, is different from most other types of waste:
A: It can be turned into valuable material, wood in particular, in combination with other resources. And
B: It moves freely across borders, from nation to nation and even over continents.

While I and many with me believe that technology will actually prevail, and save us from burning up, the “CO2 Reactor” will not work for decades. We need to capture this gas now, and we need to use proven “technology” to do it. Well here’s some news: There is a great, working process called Photosynthesis that has been around for a couple of billion years, and that actually works!

To capture and store CO2 NOW all we have to do is to beef up the planets photosynthesis capacity, harvest the captured CO2 and keep it on the ground!

Capturing and storing CO2 is slowly becoming a new business opportunity for many third world countries. The social and economic effects are many and quite amazing:

• Get paid to plant a forest: The main thing to grow if you want to capture CO2 is trees. Forests are emerging, particularly in Africa, as pure CO2 capturing ventures. The execution cannot be digitalized or outsourced, it is done by the locals.
• Get shadow and water: The trees will provide shadow and the root systems will make the ground water level raise considerably. A forest landscape on the edge of the Sahara will lower the temperature at the surface with as much as 6 centigrade!
• Introduce forest agriculture: There is forestry, meaning growing a forest, and forest agriculture, meaning growing crops in the forest between the trees. Yes, with shadow and moist in the ground it is possible to grow wheat and other stuff within the forest – on places where agriculture was impossible before.
• Commercialize Biochar: Forestry and forest agriculture produce tons of biologic waste, containing tons of captured CO2 that naturally decompose back into CO2. There is a way, called biochar, of permanently keeping this CO2 out of the atmosphere for thousands of years, and it has been known for thousands of years. Why is it not exploited? – It could be a billion $ biz…
• And so much more: Forests hold the main natural recourses for medical production. Forests do NOT consume clean water, they PRODUCE clean water (anyone saying anything different is lying!). Forests are housing the richest animal life on the planet, providing us with ecosystems, in turn providing food, protein-sources, tourism, good TV, and much more.

We need to look seriously upon the possibility and opportunity to make the entire area around the equator between the north and the south polar circles into a green zone. I’m not kidding…

http://www.girleffect.org

I think it is beautiful! Don’t you?

Earth Hour 2009 – Sign up for Earth Hour!

And finally, this is worth seeing:
www.giversign.com

“We’re aiming to reach one billion people, more than 1000 cities, all joining together in a global effort to show that its possible to take action on global warming.”

Earth Hour 2009 by WWF – Sign up for Earth Hour!

Viral, as in viral,
TIMEs, as in time(s) of course, but also as in: Telecom, Internet, Media, Entertainment, and the “s” can stand for whatever you like: Society, conceptS, diffuSion or Spread maybe? Why not Social change?

Now, prior to last year we had only seen truly viral campaigns based on one or at the most two of these areas. Typically, Internet is involved in pretty much everything called viral and “web 2.0 viral” has so far been 80% video (Internet + Entertainment) and 20% other stuff like Facebook apps, flash campaigns etc. (Internet + Entertainment/Media).

I think (and about a million other bloggers) that everything in the viral domain changed with the Obama for America campaign. There’s no need to get into campaign details here, there is plenty of blogs and websites out there that cover the campaign strategies and execution well, but I want to make an important note to self and others:

Obama for America managed, for the first time, to fully embrace all TIME branches under a viral strategy. They used Telecom not just to make “robot calls” but really managed to integrate telecom concepts (e.g. call your friends widgets) to drive viral diffusion. They used Media as Media (also to get people online) and Entertainment as Entertainment, mixing them appropriately when needed, and turned Media into Entertainment (news casts turned into viral videos) and eventually they also managed to turn Entertainment into Media when the news media started to report about Obama’s viral videos. Plouffe, Hughes, Slaby (campaign CTO), Axelrod and a bunch of other campaigners are clearly viral geniuses…

Lets hope they can deliver some change in other areas (than TIME) as well! I’d love to see some viral social change strategies executed… Need technology, Mr President?

I’d like to say -Thank You! to the Swedish Breast Cancer Fund for being digital frontiers and believing in us, and to everyone who contributed to the campaign. Thanks, keep it up and stay cool! – Changing the world will never go out of style!

Bröstcancerfonden – Digitala Rosa Bandet

When it comes to Peer-2-Peer marketing – things are different. First of all, who would sign up to advertise for cars in communications with their friends, family and colleges? No, other things are better suited for this model – like supporting non-profits and backing grassroots campaigns.

When you look at P-2-P marketing from this point of view the targeting is stunningly effective! First of all, this kind of marketing is by definition a push-marketing process. You literally force a message onto your peers as you communicate other, ordinary things. The initial studies we have made are showing attention-rates 10 times higher than the average targeted pull-advertising counterpart (i.e. banners). Additionally we see a very positive attitude to the messages distributed P-2-P.

That may of course originate from that the messages we work with are universally good-hearted and easy to like. But I think that we generally tend to like what our peers like. Think about it, fashion works that way, the music industry too. And if you let your mind exercise that statement for a minute you’ll find that most things that matter in our society are networked and endorsed Peer-2-Peer.

It strikes me that we are only just now beginning to learn how to sustainably leverage P-2-P marketing and advocacy possibilities on the Internet. That is certainly an important part of the future of online marketing. And I am lucky enough to lead the company that has developed the world’s most integrated, easy-to-use P-2-P marketing tool.
At least that’s what I think!