Category: Weekend Reading

Bowing to concerns from some of their big investors, 13 of the largest private equity firms on Tuesday will agree to a United Nations initiative for socially responsible investing, according to an industry trade group. The private equity industry has come under increased criticism in recent years from labor unions and the governments of several… Continue reading Largest private equity firms agree to a United Nations initiative for socially responsible investing

I’ve been meaning to reblog this for a while: The question of creative capitalism is whether there is some role for institutions that falls between traditional profit-making and nonprofit firms. Is the world being well served with these two clearly distinguished types of entities, one of which serves only shareholders and the other of which… Continue reading Glaeser: Can Businesses Do Well and Do Good?

Marketing, Mr. Lavoie says, can help One Laptop Per Child move toward its original goal of a $100 laptop, which is possible only with the economies of high-volume manufacturing. “To get there, they need to sell a lot of computers,” he said. New York Times

Cause-related marketing can increase sales as much as 74 percent in certain consumer-goods categories, and consumers spend twice as long looking at cause-related ads than generic corporate ones, according to a study by Cone and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business, MarketingCharts reports. The 2008 Cone/Duke University Behavioral Cause Study finds a strong link between… Continue reading Research shows that cause-related marketing can increase sales by as much as 74 percent

Jim Schorr, who lectures on social entrepreneurship at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, says he can’t imagine “a higher calling for the next generation of tech entrepreneurs.” “The opportunity to focus technology and tech entrepreneurs on the unaddressed, underserved segments of society is enormous,” Schorr said. “Developing and extending technologies with limited profit potential,… Continue reading “The opportunity to focus technology and tech entrepreneurs on the unaddressed, underserved segments of society is enormous,”

First, they confused charity with commerce: that is, they uncritically applied the language of outcome-oriented investment to efforts to change human behavior in social settings. Humans, alas, don’t operate neatly according to market logic, though incentives can shift behavior. Second, donors seem reluctant to talk about their own self interest. Instead of admitting their personal… Continue reading A Very Interesting Freakanomics Article On Philanthropy

From Business Week: The qualities that make a product good for the developing world—sturdy, cheap, adaptable, modular, energy-efficient, environmentally sound, computer platform-neutral, and bandwidth-savvy—make it a good product, period. Suddenly “less is more” goes from abstract design ideal to the only viable option. This is why some of the most innovative ideas today are coming… Continue reading Doing Good Is Smart Business

Check out Creative Capitalism blog: Creative Capitalism: A Conversation is a web experiment designed to produce a book — a collection of essays and commentary on capitalism, philanthropy and global development — to be edited by us and published by Simon and Schuster in the fall of 2008. The book takes as its starting point… Continue reading Debating Bill Gates’s theory of philanthropy

Charities are generally unwilling to cut prices for benefits, even when things get grim. “We don’t like to put the events on sale,” said Stephanie Astic, whose Stephanie Astic Productions organizes fund-raisers that are largely dependent on corporate giving. “But I think everybody is starting to freak out. At the end of the day, you… Continue reading What Happens To Charities During A Recession