Around the world, social change organizations are discovering the power of competitions and challenges to identify and award breakthrough social innovations. The World Bank has dedicated $45 million through the Development Marketplace. This year Skoll Foundation has committed approximately $10 million to their challenge. Others like Changemakers, Net Squared and the Case Foundation are managing impressive competitions and identifying important social innovators and their innovations. These competitions hold the potential to identify and fund innovative, early-stage projects with high potential for development impact. Often held online, at the global, regional and country level they attract immense talent. But what happens to the winners of these contests? How do they go on to scale-up their impact through dissemination and replication? Winning a prestigious award within the social development sector shouldn’t be a dead end. It should be a launching pad. Impact Ventures seeks to assist and accelerate the connection between social innovations identified and vetted through diverse competitions and the social entrepreneurs and organizations ready to put them into practice around the world.
Impact Ventures will aggregate all the contest winners from the social development sector into one place. Imagine a site that dynamically indentifies social innovators vetted by thought leaders and development institutions worldwide working in various sectors like health, education, conservation and climate change. These winning projects, ready for new partnerships, fresh investment and targeted technical support can be a source of inspiration for replication, while also tying new relationships that will take their work to scale.
Two primary data sources will form the initial core of Impact Ventures: data on social contestation, including the winners of dozens and potentially hundreds of social innovation challenges, and the global membership and service provider profiles from the international network of the Impact Alliance. The Impact Alliance has over 200 organizational and 2500 individual members from over fifty countries. These individuals and institutions are both seekers and implementors. This data mashup will offer a marketplace for proven innovations and connect them to organizations and individuals ready to take them to scale.
Over the last five years the Impact Alliance has cultivated an international network of over 200 organizations and 3,000 individuals, working in more than 50 countries around the world for social change. Through connecting people around innovation and action, the Impact Alliance has sparked the development and scale-up of social innovations like the Local Governance Barometer. The Local Governance Barometer is a joint venture among several members providing a participatory, multi-stakeholder framework to access governance conditions at the local level. Visit http://www.pact.mg/lgb to learn more.
To launch the Impact Ventures mashup, we believe that we will need:
Impact Ventures proposes to aggregate from sites like: www.changemakers.net ; www.developmentmarketplace.org ; and www.skollfoundation.org/skollawards ; among dozens of other social innovation source sites.
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