Posts Tagged ‘innovation’

Celebrating 5 years of SSE-O

Friday, August 4th, 2017

The School for Social Entrepreneurs – Ontario (SSE-O) recently celebrated 5 years of activity by organizing a retreat to reflect about achievements and challenges of the past five years and think about what’s next the next five years. As usual, SSE-O assembled a highly diverse and inspiring group of people and with support from the BMW Foundation was able to hold the retreat on Wasan Island in Muskoka’s Lake Joseph. Two years ago a similar retreat also organized by SSE-O on Wasan Island resulted in founding the League of Intrapreneurs Canada.

Wasan-2

SSE-O Retreat Wasan 2017

Wasan is a wonderful place where nature’s beauty and superb place-making, reflected as much in the design of the common spaces as in the quality and talents of the Island’s staff, creates ideal conditions to detach from daily tasks and engage in deep reflection and meaningful conversations. During the retreat SSE-O also tested new tools including a practice of Unlearning and the CPS method to explore if these could be used more broadly in the future. But the most valuable outcomes (aside from the action plan) were in the new friendships made and the inspiration gained.

Happy 5th Anniversary SSE-O. We are looking forward to your next achievements.

Graduation of Social Intrapreneur Fellows

Saturday, March 11th, 2017

The School for Social Entrepreneurs Ontario (SSE-O) in collaboration with the League of Intrapreneurs Canada (of which we are proudly a co-founder) co-designed the Social  Intrapreneurs Fellowship to provide social intrapreneurs with the tools, network, and confidence to make social change at their workplaces in government, non-profits, and companies. 

Last month, the 2016-2017 cohort of Social Intrapreneur Fellows completed their fellowships. To celebrate this great accomplishment as these fellows embark on a new adventure SSE-O is organizing “Fellow-bration”, a celebration of the graduates 6-9 pm on Tuesday March 28th at the Centre for Social Innovation Annex.

You can register here.

The gathering will be an opportunity to learn more about the League of Intrapreneurs Canada’s ambitious plans for the future, and find out how you can get involved.

Intrapreneurship – Big Initiative from a Small Island

Saturday, September 19th, 2015

Wasan Island is a small island in lake Rosseau in the heart of Muskoka. It is privately owned by the Breuniger Stiftung, a German non-profit organization. It offers leaders in civil society, politics, culture and business the opportunity to retreat to a peaceful and beautiful environment in order to develop their thinking, networks, and initiatives. Access is by invitation only. (more…)

OCAD’s Yogya Team Competing in Hult $1M Prize

Thursday, April 9th, 2015

The Yogya team of students of the Strategic Foresight & Innovation (SFI) program at OCAD University is still competing to reach the finals of the $1Million Hult Prize. They are determined to help bring Early Childhood Education to 10 Million children in urban slums. Yogya means worthy as in “every child is worthy”. The team has engaged in the Hult on-line challenge and have put their project up for crowdfunding on Indiegogo. They need this seed money to prototype their solution and field test it. Now it’s a race against time. If they reach their goals in number of funders and in amount funded, they will get into the finals of the Hult Prize competition. Indeed, it is a project worthy of support. Please contribute what you can!

Hult 2015 – $1M Prize Competition

Friday, March 13th, 2015

This global competition is organized by the Hult Prize Foundation, a not-for-profit organization aiming at solving the planet’s biggest challenges with innovative ideas implemented through sustainable start-up social enterprises. Annual Hult Prize winners get USD1 million in seed funding to make their ideas reality. Although it was originally conceived to attract “the world’s brightest business minds”, it is seeing increasing numbers of multidisciplinary teams participating, including from many design schools.

This year’s challenge is about early childhood education in urban slums for children aged 0-6 years. The objective is to reach 10 Million children within 5 years. The competition is staged first at local and regional levels around the world. The six regional finalist teams attend in July and August a six-week program at the Hult Accelerator at the Hult Business School in Boston. They then compete in the global finals in an event attended by President Clinton where the winning team will be selected.

This year two teams from OCAD University’s Strategic Foresight & Innovation (SFI) masters program participated in the local competition with about 22,000 submissions globally. The two teams moved to the regional finals.

Team Msana to Shanghai

 

 

 

 

Team YOGYA to San Francisco

 

Two OCADU teams at the Regional Finals

 

 

 

 

 

One team from the part-time SFI program team is currently in Shanghai while the other team from the SFI full-time program is currently in San Francisco. Each of them will be competing with about 250 regional candidates. We wish them both the best of luck!

Counting Down to the Business Innovation Summit

Friday, March 6th, 2015

In partnership with the Conference Board of Canada, Manara would like to invite you to attend the Business Innovation Summit 2015 on April 28-29, 2015 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre. As a valued member, we are happy to extend a reduced rate of $795—that’s $500 in savings—for you to attend.

The speakers will be asking tough questions and push you to innovate like a champion! The event will feature speed networking with mentors, interactive learning sessions, and plenary sessions, all accounting for opportunity to dialogue and collaborate with the key players.

Business Innovation Summit 2015 features some of North America’s leading innovators to share their candid advice and insight. The Conference Board has secured a number of highly profiled leaders in innovation, including:

  • Allen Lau, CEO and Co-founder of Wattpad, and Craig Hunter, CEO of Bitmaker Labs to share their successes as serial entrepreneurs;
  • Dan Waldschmidt, Author of Edgy Conversations: How Ordinary People Achieve Outrageous Success to tell you how to innovate like a champion;
  • Ashley Good, CEO and Founder of Fail Forward will explore how to fail intelligently in practice; and
  • Sir Terry Matthews, Founder, Wesley Clover Corporation, and Chairman, March Networks will explore how Canada needs to seize today’s opportunities in the digital world to create more global success stories.

View the full agenda on the Conference Board’s website.

Register to reserve your seat at the leading innovation event in Canada. Quote your rebate code PRM10 when registering to take advantage of your special rate of $795. Please note that this rate is available for non-registered delegates only.

If you have any questions about the program or need help with registration, please contact Emily Hayward at hayward@conferenceboard.ca or 613-526-3090 ext. 393.

We hope to see you at this important event!

 

TRIEC Connector Program – Pilot

Monday, January 26th, 2015

TRIEC, the Toronto Regional Immigrants Employment Council, is launching an interesting new program called Connector. The program creates networking opportunities for skilled internationally trained professionals, and their established GTA counterparts. The idea behind the program is simple enough: business needs talent; talent needs opportunities. Connect offers to provide such opportunities through the network effect. We are thrilled to join the Advisory Board of this interesting project.  Its first meeting will be held on Thursday January 29, 9-11 AM at the offices of TRIEC in Toronto.

Business Innovation Summit 2015 – Special Rate for Manara friends!

Monday, January 26th, 2015

We are pleased to announce that we have partnered with The Conference Board of Canada on the Business Innovation Summit 2015: Connect, Collaborate, and Innovate Together taking place on April 28-29, 2015 at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre.

Business Innovation Summit (BIS) 2015 is the premier event to connect, network, and learn from Canada’s top innovators! (more…)

Celebrating 3 years of Strongly Sustainable Business Model Research

Thursday, January 15th, 2015

On Tuesday January 13th, 2015 the Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group (SSBMG) held it’s first monthly meeting of 2015. This marked the beginning of the group’s fourth year and called for a brief celebratory exchange about the achievements of the group in the past three years:

The SSBMG LinkedIn group counts now almost 330 members including key researchers and practitioners of sustainable business modeling from around the world.

A new sophisticated and intriguing tool has been developed based on the remarkable work of Antony Upward, one of the group’s co-founders. This new tool, the Flourishing Business Canvas (FBC) allows business model analysis and innovation while encompassing critical elements and relationships that main stream tools such as Osterwalder’s Business Model Canvas could not capture, so for example business risks from social and environmental causes that usually do not appear on the balance sheet. The FBC is being currently tested with  organizations of various type and size. It has been presented in a number of international conferences and workshops in the US and Europe.

SSBMG long-time member Bob Willard has been contributing significantly to the global effort of developing a reliable benchmark to identify the performance indicators and corresponding values that must be achieved to become a strongly sustainable enterprises. His and his colleagues hard work came finally to fruition with the publication late in 2014 of Public Draft 1.0 of the Future Fit Business Benchmark, which is available now for comment and feedback.

In the area of impact measurement and social asset valuation and tracking, SSBMG member Anshula Chowdhury, CEO of Toronto-based Social Asset Measurements Inc., brought the annual conference of Social Impact Analysts Association (SIAA) usually held in Europe to convene in Toronto for the first time. The conference titled “Talking Data: Measurement with a Message” took place November 3 and 4, 2014. It was an excellent and rich event that included City Impact Tours for delegates to visit various organizations in the City of Toronto. SSBMG was one of the select City Impact Tours destinations and welcomed about 15 delegates for an afternoon to introduce them to its work.

In the past 2 years we also started our new research stream within SSBMG exploring the decision-making processes of SME leaders and their mental models while making these decisions. Two Major Research Projects (MRP) were completed. One investigated a sample of progressive SME leaders when making business decisions involving social and/or environmental aspects. The second used a similar methodology to investigate a sample of main stream SME leaders. This research stream produced a number of insights that will contribute to the design brief of the tools and methods being developed for SME leaders. It also posed new critical questions about the position of business modeling in the strategy formulation processes of SMEs.

The past year saw a steady flow of monthly meeting presentations by members of SSBMG about their work: Natalie Robinson, Marion Real, Alexandre Joyce from Montreal, Cilia Holmes Indahl from HEC Paris, Lindsay Clinton from SustainAbility (US), Marie-Claude Lacerte from HEC Montreal, Merlina Missimer from Sweden, Randy Saad from the Harbour Front Centre, Nancy Bocken from TU Delft in the UK.

More importantly many relationships and collaborations started emerging. One example is the workshop organized by the Canvas team in February 2014, which attracted members from other locations (Montreal to Hamburg). The interaction between members and the cross pollination of ideas is an essential component of SSBMG’s value proposition. Another example is the blog started by Group member Florian Lüdeke-Freund of the University of Hamburg in Germany. In a recent post on the LinkedIn group Florian wrote: “2014 was the second year for our platform, and it was a very good year: 13 active bloggers, 130 entries in our open publication list, a total of 49 posts since the blog’s start in February 2013 and our new “Papers in Brief” series have attracted 7,900 page views in 2014, and 10,200 page views in total!”

So there is much to celebrate but also much work still to be done. In 2015 SSBMG will continue developing the major streams, paying attention to synchronization and alignment between the different streams. An important area of exploration will be how the Group measures its own progress towards achieving its objective of “accelerating the transition of SMEs to sustainability“. It will be an interesting journey again and we look forward to continuing participating and contributing.

SSBMG January 2015 Meeting

Monday, January 12th, 2015

The Strongly Sustainable Business Model Group will be holding its January meeting on Tuesday January 13th, 4:30-6:00 PM at OCAD University’s Strategic Innovation Lab. On the Agenda for this month are news and updates about members activities and achievements as well as a discussion on how to measure the progress of the Group towards achieving its mission: The acceleration of the transition of small and medium enterprises (SME) to  sustainability.