If you read only one article from the fall 2008 issue of Stanford Social Innovation Review, make it “Rediscovering Social Innovation”. In this article, the authors define social innovation and explain why it is the best way to produce lasting social change across all kinds of boundaries. In “Cultivating the Green Consumer,” find out why Americans who say they want to go green actually don’t.
Consumers say they want to buy ecologically friendly products and reduce their impact on the environment. But when they get to the cash register, their Earth-minded sentiments die on the vine. Although individual quirks underlie some of this hypocrisy, businesses can do a lot more to help would-be green consumers turn their talk into walk.
The world's neediest people are using mobile phones in ways that were never intended, and with great success. With wireless technologies, Indian farmers are finding out the latest crop prices, Nigerian youth are learning how to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS, and Peruvian citizens are reporting criminal activity in their neighborhoods. Yet dialing into these powerful tools is not always straightforward. The author explains how to make the wireless revolution ring in economic growth and prosperity for people living at the bottom of the pyramid.
Certain nonprofits can take a page from business's playbook and learn how to attract cash for expansion.
Social entrepreneurship and social enterprise have become popular and positive rallying points for those trying to improve the world, but social innovation is a better vehicle for understanding and creating social change in all of its manifestations.
LivingGoods sends its version of Avon ladies—white-uniformed "health promoters"—knocking on doors in hundreds of Ugandan communities.
Why the Soccer Ball Project—one of the world's first multistakeholder efforts to stop abuses of labor rights—is failing to protect workers in Pakistan.
LaserMonks, a multimillion-dollar enterprise, sells ink-jet cartridges and other office supplies online to support its Cistercian abbey in Wisconsin and to help others.
To share its expertise without jeopardizing its mission, FareStart spun out a new organization.
The Posse Foundation sends diverse students to college together so that they can lean on each other and lead their schools.
By tailoring its methods to local values and needs, Rare has slowly seeded conservation programs in 40 countries. Yet as more and more species teeter on the brink of extinction, the organization must expand quickly. Here's how the boutique nonprofit is delivering customized Rare Pride social marketing campaigns to millions of people in the planet's most fragile ecosystems.
The violence, noise, and crowding of poor neighborhoods stress kids and parents, bringing out their bad sides and breeding psychopathology.
The military's better than civilian life, say minorities and women such as Marine Corps Capt. Elizabeth Okoreeh-Baah, the first woman to pilot the V-22 Osprey.
THE INSANITY OFFENSE: How America's Failure to Treat the Seriously Mentally Ill Endangers Its Citizens by E. Fuller Torrey
SUPERCAPITALISM: The Transformation of Business, Democracy, and Everyday Life by Robert Reich
In this interview with James A. Phills Jr., the Stanford Social Innovation Review's academic editor, former presidential advisor David Gergen discusses his views on social innovation, why social entrepreneurs should be more engaged in politics, and how the federal government can work with and even fund social entrepreneurs.
