Happy New Year 2013

Throughout 2012, the danone.communities blog has eagerly shared the latest developments in our own projects, news from the world of social business, and the ideas that make social business so compelling.

Here are just a few of the year’s highlights as mentioned on our blog:

At the beginning of the year, Fortune Magazine named Muhammad Yunus as one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our time, alongside Apple’s Steve Jobs and Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Perhaps not by coincidence, it was Bangladeshi Nazia Zebin who won the project grant in our Social Business Youngsters competition on Facebook. A 24-years-old student, Nazia is committed to promoting access to culture for everyone in Bangladesh, including rural residents. In May, she traveled to Paris for the Global Communities Meeting, where she met experts from the social business community who had come to work together and imagine the solutions and initiatives of the future.  

Our midyear highlight is always June 28: Social Business Day, celebrating the people who practice social business around the world. Here in Paris, danone.communities held a conference to give them a voice and to continue our mission of raising awareness of social business.

An expert network to learn and share about social innovation.

During the 2012 edition of Global Communities Meeting in Paris, danone.communities has initiated a new meeting, before the conference with Pr. Yunus. This special meeting was called Experts Workshops Meeting.

Since its creation in 2007, danone.communities has been evolving in a partnership’s galaxy and has never walked alone. Indeed, Grameen Danone Foods Ltd, the 1rst project, originally started thanks to its partners: Grameen Bank. Without the Grameen Bank’s knowledge and expertise, Danone would have met much more difficulties to enter this new territory. Moreover, without the support of Care Bangladesh, it would have been much harder to settle up again the door-to-door sales network in 2008, after the milk crisis.

With years and with projects, the partners’ network got wider and today it gathers about 50 partners, for 10 projects. At danone.communities, we know that all these partners are experts of specific topics: micro-distribution, finance, social impact…

While designing the Global Communities Meeting 2012, the danone.communities team has decided to gather more experts in the same place to make emerge learnings and knowledge to share and spread good practices or things to avoid for a social business project.

The Global Social Business Summit 2012 in Vienna : the new Pecha Kucha format

Now you all know the Global Social Business Summit 2012, it’s time to enter its program and to focus on a presentation format that was not used last year. This new format is Pecha Kucha, from the sound of the Japanese term “chit chat”.

Pecha Kucha was born in 2003 in Tokyo, Japan when young designers and architects organized events to share their projects, the Pecha Kucha Nights. As they were too much talkative (like anybody dealing with a Power Point presentation), they defined a very sharp format: 20 images, each for 20 seconds. The presentation last almost 7 minutes and is mostly made of images and people just have to talk along the images.

Global Social Business Summit has inserted this format into its 3 days meetings with international experts. It promises beautiful speeches and very fun and interactive moments.

More information here http://www.pecha-kucha.org/

Two Pecha Kucha presentations.

Global Social Business Summit 2012: the program!

The Global Social Business Summit is an international event that gathers more than 600 persons to share and celebrate social business. And for the 4th time, social business will be celebrated in Vienna, Austria, in November 7th-10th.

The international context of the event is a great opportunity for all innovation and social business actors to meet and share about their projects. Each year, many speakers, on stage, and participants during the workshops can go further into the main topics of social business: finance, social impact, micro-distribution, companies initiatives, local communities, empowerment…

The program of this 4^th edition may delight its attendees, with 4 days of speeches and workshops. Danone.communities will be there to animate workshops and tell you more about its projects !

Find it out just here!

Below, the video review of GSBS 2011.

Micro-distribution, a major lever for social businesses

This article was orginally published on down To Earth's blog.

Many of the projects supported by danone.communities and the Ecosystem Fund develop a micro-distribution approach. What exactly does it bring to social businesses, and how does it nourish business innovation in both the developed and developing markets?

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SUMMARY

Micro-distribution is a great opportunity for social businesses, since it both helps underprivileged populations on the path to employment and empowerment, and provides healthy food to a greater number of people. But it also has many challenges to face to reach a larger scale and become truly profitable and replicable. Which leaves a lot of room for innovation and creativity.

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