The OnP column: News, views & inspiration

David Puttergill, October 2014 Associate, shares this fortnight’s highlights from the social enterprise scene, plus some insider news from the On Purpose programme.

Profit + purpose

“We are at the beginning of a new era for purpose-driven businesses”, at least that’s the argument made by Arianna Huffington in launching a new platform (sponsored by my old firm PwC) to celebrate the diverse ways in which the tone of business, both large and small, is changing. There are some gems in there so take a look.

Nesta’s top tips on impact measurement

In impact measurement, “like all early stage markets, systems, standards and structure have yet to be formed”. To help speed this learning up Nesta released a report (summary here) explaining their experience of impact measurement from their social investments. Among them: keep iterating, use it to avoid mission drift and remember to invest in measurement!

A world without work- should we be excited or terrified?

Could the rise of “robotisation” and better software be leading to “an era of technological unemployment, in which computer scientists and software engineers essentially invent us out of work”? This article (which caused some conversation among the fellows) goes through some of the economic arguments, but also raises the devastating impact that this could have communities, based on de-industrialising cities in the USA, and some of the ways that they’ve learned to cope.

What we learned last week:

I was off kayaking last week but the rest of the October 2014 cohort were focused on CV writing (only 3 months to go…) and social innovation with the fantastic Femke Van Der Veer from Bright Blue.

From our network:

On Purpose are soon launching our new collaboration platform to bring Fellows, Associates and the core team closer together and to identify and cultivate shared interests beyond the one year spent in the programme.