“Visions without metrics are hallucinations”, said one speaker at this year’s Skoll World Forum, which hosted the launch of the beta version of the Social Progress Index on April 11th. The importance of rigorously measuring social impact is one of the key themes of our writing about philanthrocapitalism. That is why we have been enthusiastic supporters […]
Can and should companies be in the business of doing good? This long-running debate was graced earlier this year by a new contribution from Michael Porter, one of the world’s leading management gurus, and his sometime sidekick, philanthropy consultant Mark Kramer. In a headline article in the Harvard Business Review they both took a swipe at […]
Time has come for closing arguments in our debate with Felix Salmon. In his final shot he offered up the typically provocative (and false) assertion that ‘Philanthrocapitalism coddles CEOs’. This came as a bit of a surprise, since we have written extensively about the failings of corporate bosses to grasp the scale of the challenge […]
The news that $4.3 billion of new money was pledged on June 13th to vaccinate children in the developing world against several deadly diseases is worth celebrating. The money was promised at the first ever pledging conference for the Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation (GAVI), which exceeded its target of $3.7 billion. That means […]
Imagine if countries competed with each other to create the best environment in which social innovation can happen… That’s the idea behind a new project we are working on, with Jed Emerson of Blended Value fame: the “Social Competitiveness Index”. The concept has been developed under the auspices of the World Economic Forum’s Global Redesign Initiative, by […]
There was much soul-searching at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week. Matthew, who was there covering the event for the Economist, was struck by the mixture of gloom and optimism: gloom, because the recovery of the world economy is still fragile at best; optimism, because there is a will to build a better economic system. One […]
David Cameron is widely expected to become Britain’s next prime minister. Plenty of people in the world of international development worry that a Conservative British government will be less committed to international aid than the current Labour government. So the surprise appearance that Cameron made last night at an event at the World Economic Forum […]
We have had the impressive spontaneous outpouring of generosity in response to the crisis in Haiti and the fine words about building back the small Caribbean nation better than it was before. The question now is ‘how’? That is going to be one of the hot topics for the leading brains of government, business and […]