SUMMARY OF FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS
expansion of incubators and accelerators. Partnerships and leveraging expertise from different sectors are critical to foster collaboration that can increase the emergence of both impact enterprises and impact investors. Field development is viewed by pioneers as part of their responsibility to grow the impact enterprise sector. Support for initiatives such as B-Corp and SOCAP, which increase the enabling environment, are important components. Knowledge building, in the form of case studies and sharing of lessons learned, increases awareness about impact enterprise and helps to develop international best practices. Advocating for more conducive public policies falls under field development and includes working with governments to design policies to foster the emergence of impact enterprises and to channel government resources to fund the sector. CORFO, the government entity in Chile promoting entrepreneurship and innovation to improve productivity in the country, is an example of a pioneer in the field of public sector donors: it is one of the few government agencies in Latin America to pilot support to impact enterprises. CORFO runs an Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship Competition, which funds projects promoting social entrepreneurship. CORFO piloted the program this year and has found its two main challenges to be creating measurement instruments—since the government agency needs new tools to measure impact enterprises’ social impact— and creating a coherent terminology for the field, as there is a lack of awareness about impact enterprise and social business in Chile. The Lemelson Foundation is another pioneer donor in Latin America. The family foundation supports inventors and entrepreneurs building invention-based businesses that either create products that satisfy basic human needs, or enhance the ability of the target populations to create and manage income (i.e. agriculture, etc.). The Lemelson Foundation places a strong emphasis on capacity support, which it sees as critical to building self-sustaining organizations. Furthermore, capacity support is a means to an end: it achieves sustainability for organizations or businesses that can exist permanently as “agents of change” in the ecosystem in which they operate, becoming role models for public/private sources. As a moderately-sized foundation, it believes it can tackle the early-stage challenges more effectively, since often large foundations and governments are not able to adapt the size of their investment to the needs of the impact enterprise. The Lemelson Foundation’s approach is to support enterprises early and take big risks. It recognizes that a return on “inventiveness” does not happen quickly, or without patience. Building and promoting technological innovation will see a return in a 10, 20, or 30-year timeframe.
no free ride: sowing the seeds of impact enterprise. summary of findings & recommendations Prepared by NESsT for The Rockefeller Foundation. Copyright © 2012 NESsT.
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