A New Voice for Social Enterprise

Welcome to my first post as Editor of the Social Enterprise section. I hope you will enjoy the content and join me in tracking new trends.

I've been a fan of Justmeans and its Founder/CEO Martin Smith and I'm delighted by the conversations that you, he and others in the Justmeans community have seeded around the unique opportunity that exists at this moment of time to make market-based change in the world. As a journalist and author whose career has included stints as an investigative reporter, writer and editor in the United States and abroad for such news companies as NPR, Hearst, BusinessWeek, MSNBC, and Knight-Ridder, I've been fortunate to have had a front-row seat at some of the biggest stories of our times -- the rise of the global economy, the proliferation of the Internet, and the emergence of today's newly self-organized, cause-wired groups that are just starting to take on traditional businesses and challenge them to do better.

Thanks to mass globalization and social media -- now evolving from social networking to mobilization --the world has never seemed smaller, nor more aware of itself. We can see the same brands being advertised in central Dubai as in Manhattan; our closest neighbors are more likely now to be found online; everything can be googled, and we have never been so mobile: there is more computing power in our Blackberries than there was in the control room in Houston that put a man on the moon.

All of this, of course, presents both an opportunity and a burden for today's social enterprise movement. In a networked world where everyone is adjacent and everything can be known, we are seeing increasing evidence of the inequities around us. "When you are actually adjacent to these people -- the have-nots [and when the have-nots know what we have]," All for Good cofounder Jonathan Greenblatt said last month at Mashable's social enterprise conference in Manhattan, "it puts a burden on the 'haves' [in society]." Indeed, he and others say, we are compelled to invent new alternatives.

What's encouraging is that this new "economy of integrity" is already in the making, giving us different answers than the ones we've heard before to the questions we are facing as a society. Think Zipcar, the Netflix for cars. Or Living Homes, a Los Angeles-based construction business that is building homes that generate more power than they consume. Or Tom's Shoes, which donates a pair of shoes to someone in need for every pair purchased. Or Revolution Foods, which is offering healthier meals to kids around the U.S. as an alternative to junk food in public schools.

And that's just for starters. The lion's share of new business growth in the next 10-15 years will be at the "bottom of the pyramid" where the poorest billions live. Social enterprise and social media will both cohere this moment of opportunity and catalyze it, for better or worse. We have opportunities before us that were never before possible.

My request to you? Help me analyze and explore this perfect storm of adjacency, new media and social innovation that animates today's social enterprise movement. Share what keeps you up at night and the new ideas for more socially responsible businesses that are gaining traction in your networks. I agree with Ashoka founder Bill Drayton, who said at last month's Clinton Global Initiative that the global economic crisis has finally given legitimacy to social enterprise as the best hope for innovation in the 21st century. While most social enterprises still struggle to scale impact and measure it, he said, these new "triple-bottom-line" businesses are "potent with possibilities for fueling the revolutions we've all been waiting for."

I look forward to exploring them with you, together.