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Social businesses make up just 10 percent of European ventures. The European Commission wants to see more. Through the new Social Business Initiative, the Commission plans to create an ecosystem conducive to social businesses, in part by facilitating access to funding. The belief is that more...

Never before have financial indicators dominated news like today, but perhaps the most important indicator for competitiveness of our societies remains human: How many changemakers are there? At Ashoka, we talk about making a world where Everyone is a Changemaker—empowering people to engineer social...

“In a social business, community impact comes first,” was one of the fundamental insights in the first Community Impact Development Group (CIDG) meeting hosted by Ashoka and the Siemens Stiftung in October 2010, and one of the essential claims that members of this group wanted to voice within the...

This is the third and final in a series of interviews where we speak with leading innovators who are appropriating lessons from open source thinking—once purely the domain of the software engineer—for social change. Casey Fenton is co-founder of CouchSurfing and an Ashoka Fellow in the United States...

When is impact legitimately "incalculable?" Is a limited ability to wrap metrics around your impact ever acceptable or desirable? The last decade saw the birth and mainstreaming of concepts that captivated our attention and made an indelible, if incalculable impact on our lives. The BoP initiative...

Last week’s record-breaking heat wave was all kinds of sticky and uncomfortable. But the inconvenience of 100-plus-degree temperatures is nothing compared to one of the hottest topics nationwide: the sluggish economic recovery. Twenty-five million Americans are still scraping by in vulnerable...

Ashoka and Boehringer Ingelheim, one of the world’s largest and most innovative pharmaceutical companies, yesterday announced a new global partnership: “Making More Health.” Making More Health is a three-year initiative aimed at improving health in communities around the world—promoting strong...

When one of Germany’s biggest corporations, Siemens, decided to create a foundation, its leadership knew social business models were a key tool in achieving community impact. Their early research led them to Ashoka, and the innovative social change Ashoka Fellows are making all over around the world...

New research suggests that business leaders in every part of the globe are under-performing when it comes to the skills and capacities they will need in the 21st Century. Gurnek Baines and his team at YSC undertook a detailed analysis of 1,500 business executives across the world and ranked their...