How to Change the World

Posted Mon, 03/15/2010 - 18:05 by BRINQ Admin
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
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Bornstein provides a compendium of social entrepreneurs and how they are changing their worlds, while offering some observations and principles of social entrepreneurship along the way. Though the stories and examples tend to stay on the non-profit side of the fence, the book is a valuable read for those looking for inspiring stories and real life examples of how people are using entrepreneurial energy to better the world.

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Book Description
Published in over twenty countries, How to Change the World has become the Bible for social entrepreneurship. It profiles men and women from around the world who have found innovative solutions to a wide variety of social and economic problems. Whether they work to deliver solar energy to Brazilian villagers, or improve access to college in the United States, social entrepreneurs offer pioneering solutions that change lives.

Discover surprising facts about social entrepreneurs from author David Bornstein

  • According to a recent Harris Poll, a whopping 97% of Generation Y are looking for work that allows them "to have an impact on the world."

  • In recent years, courses or centers in social entrepreneurship have been created in over 250 universities and colleges such as Harvard Business School, Yale School of Management, Duke, NYU's Stern & Wagner, Wharton, Oxford, and Stanford.

  • Teach for America received 25,000 applications for 3,700 slots in 2008, an increase of more than a third over 2007. In Ivy League schools such as Yale, Cornell, and Dartmouth, close to 10% of all graduates applied to the program.

  • In the past two years, the Acumen Fund, an organization that supports social entrepreneurs who solve major problems through business solutions (eg. malaria nets, water purification, loans for housing), received more than 1,000 applications from top ranked business students for just 15 fellowship positions.

  • The list of top business entrepreneurs who are focusing either full time or a considerable amount of time on social entrepreneurship is highly impressive:
    1. Pierre Omidyar, founder of ebay, created Omidyar Network to "enable individual self-empowerment on a global scale."
    2. Jeff Skoll, cofounder of ebay, also runs Participant Productions, which makes socially conscious films including An Inconvenient Truth and Goodnight and Good Luck.
    3. Bill Gates has left Microsoft to pursue a full-time career in philanthropy.
    4. Warren Buffett recently donated $30 billion to the Gates Foundation.
    5. William Draper, one of the biggest venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, created the Draper Richards Foundation to support social entrepreneurs.
    6. Klaus Schwab, the founder of the World Economic Forum (Davos), founded the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship.
    7. Sergey Brin and Larry Page, founders of Google, created Google.org, which supports social entrepreneurs and has raised over $1 billion.
    8. Legendary venture capitalist John Doerr is leading an effort to raise $100 million for microcredit loans.

  • The Grameen Bank, the leading example for social entrepreneurs worldwide, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006.

  • The Bridgespan Group, a consulting group that advises social entrepreneurs, received 1,800 applications for 18 job openings in 2006.

Product Description

How to Change the World provides vivid profiles of social entrepreneurs. The book is an In Search of Excellence for social initiatives, intertwining personal stories, anecdotes, and analysis. Readers will discover how one person can make an astonishing difference in the world.
The case studies in the book include Jody Williams, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for the international campaign against landmines she ran by e-mail from her Vermont home; Roberto Baggio, a 31-year old Brazilian who has established eighty computer schools in the slums of Brazil; and Diana Propper, who has used investment banking techniques to make American corporations responsive to environmental dangers.
The paperback edition will offer a new foreword by the author that shows how the concept of social entrepreneurship has expanded and unfolded over the last few years, including the Gates-Buffetts charitable partnership, the rise of Google, and the increased mainstream coverage of the subject. The book will also update the stories of individual social entrepreneurs that appeared in the cloth edition.