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Socialinio verslo aplinka

Nors daug kalbama apie socialinio verslo naudą šalies ekonomikai , šalies Ūkio ir inovacijų ministerija tik 2015 metais pateikė  socialinio verslo koncepciją ir  rekomendacijas šiam verslui vystyti.

Ar gali socialinis verslas sumažinti skurdą ir atskirtį kaimiškose Lietuvos teritorijose, sunku atsakyti. Viena tikrai aišku, kad pabandyti verta vien tam , kad įtrauktume vietos žmones į savo problemų sprendimą, skatintume  bendruomeniškumo ir asmeninio savarankiškumo ugdymą. Todėl sveikintina , kad Lietuvos žemės ūkio ministerija pirmoji pasiūlė finansinę paramą socialiniam verslui kurti kaimiškose regionuose, tam panaudojant 2014-2020 Lietuvos kaimo plėtros programos Leader priemonę.

2017 -11-09 Lietuvos Respublikos žemės ūkio ministro įsakymu Nr. 3D-720 patvirtintos socialinio verslo vykdymo pagal Lietuvos kaimo plėtros 2014-2020 metų programos priemonės gairės.

 

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Social impact investment in the Nordic-Baltic Region – Ideas and opportunities, needs and challenges using examples from Estonia, Latvia and Finland

A Nordic-Baltic regional project “Social impact investment regional cooperation plan for Estonia, Latvia and Finland” has published a comprehensive map of the current situation in social impact investment within Nordic-Baltic region. The aim of the published material and cooperation of the project partners (the Estonian Social Enterprise Network, the Social Entrepreneurship Association of Latvia and the Finnish Association for Social Enterprises) has been quicker development of the social impact investment ecosystem.  

 

INSPIRATION ON HOW TO DEVELOP SOCIAL IMPACT INVESTMENT

Social impact investment is the provision of finance to organisations addressing societal needs with the expectation of a measurable societal as well as financial return. Put more simply, it means investing into enterprises that create good stuff and eliminate bad stuff or transform it into good stuff. Social impact investment enables stakeholders to start up and scale up enterprises that tackle societal challenges with the help of sustainable business models.

The discussion paper on “Social impact investment in the Nordic-Baltic region” presents ideas and opportunities as well as needs and challenges of developing social impact investment field in the Nordic-Baltic region. It provides an overview of the current situation and insight to near future developments to anyone interested in how to finance social impact investment.

 

CHALLENGES AND HOW TO TACKLE THEM

Challenges to developent of social impact investments occur at both national and regional levels. The objectives related to increasing the demand and supply of investments are mostly national, mainly because the immediate impact of social enterprises usually occurs on a local or national level. However, the activities to achieve the objectives like raising awareness while building up stakeholders´ motivation, skills and capacity can and should be regional. Any individual country currently lacks a critical mass of stakeholders and resources to speed up the development of the social impact investment ecosystem to meet societal challenges quickly.

The main challenges include:

  1. Low awareness about the topics and possibilities related to social impact investment
  2. The potential developers of the social impact investment ecosystem lack skills and the capacity to take ownership and initiative
  3. The demand side for social impact investment is weak
  4. The supply side of social impact investment is weak

 

The regional activities to tackle such challenges are described as follows:

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For more info on the country-level situations in Estonia, Latvia and Finland as well as insightful case studies  and an annex of “greatest hits” of international reports and analysis on social impact investment, see the full material here.

 

Regional cooperation was supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers´ Office in Estonia.

Public has a right to know that social enterprise customers are happy

EETTI & INNO Research Project (Finnish Social Enterprise Association Arvoliitto) has launched findings of it’s research on ethics and innovation in social enterprises.  The research has been aiming to find out how ethics and innovativeness are linked, what type of innovativeness do social enterprises need, and what do social enterprises have to give for today’s Finland. This has been the first time when large Finnish social enterprises’ key principles and innovativeness has been researched.

The research has included 8 large Finnish social enteprises:

Setlementtiasunnot 

ASPA 

Autismisäätiö  

Y-Säätiö 

Kierrätysverkko Oy 

Kuntoutuskeskus Kankaanpää 

Suomen Olympiakomitea 

Helsingin diakonissalaitos 

55 interviews, as well as employee and customer inquiries were conducted during the research.

KEY FINDINGS OF EETTI & INNO RESEARCH 

Key findings of the research include the 7 strenghts of social enterprises:

  1. Human centricity
  2. High customer satisfaction
  3. Work relevance
  4. Innovativeness
  5. Ethicality
  6. Customer involvement and participation
  7. Ethical leadership

The research abstract concludes, that there were 2 surprising things in the findings: The importance of the social mission is to alignment of the enterprise future activities and  how central the customers role is in how the enterprise operates.

ETHICALITY AND INNOVATIVENESS IN SOCIAL ENTERPRISES

After conducting the research, these concepts are defined by the research team as follows:

Ethicality in social enterprises

Ethicality is based on this research on a thought of dialogic ethics. According to this ethics people, such as customers or employees, and genuinely encontering them,  must be central to social enterprise activities. Appreciative encountering requires trusting relations and continuous dialogue. The aim of the encountering is to act for the best of the customer, finding solutions together with the customer. Responsibility is present in the dialogue; social enterprise workers are responsible for the customer of the service they produce.

Social innovations in social enterprises

According the this research is a new way of operating, product or process which responses to the customer needs, solves problems, produces new solutions and enhances wellbeing in social enterprise and through that in the wider society. Innovations are born in three levels: everyday innovations on a macro-level, partnership innovations in meso-level, and strategic innovations in a macro-level.

 

VALUE REVOLUTION

The project has also published a book  – Arvovallankumous (Value Revolution) – at the end of May. The book features 16 articles about ethical business from different angles. The book is a easy-to-read collection of knowledge of business where social and economic value is built simultaneously.

 

More info about the project, the findings and the book (in Finnish): http://www.arvoliitto.fi/eetti-inno/

#arvovallankumous

Featured picture from a presentation of Alf Rehn in Arvovallankumous research findings and book publishing event May 31st 2018.

 

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Social Entrepreneurships in Education

Social entrepreneurship (SE) is slowly making its way into the education system. Social entrepreneurship is already a concept taught in universities around the world, and some examples of SE education can be found at schools too, however the concept is still relatively new and education systems can be notoriously slow to change.

“Social Entrepreneurships in Education” is a document developed by British Council, which introduces the real exemplars of collaboration between teachers, children, entrepreneurs and the community, as well as reveals the existing opportunities and challenges in order to initiate larger discussion on a topic. The number of interviews were held with professionals in teaching and social business in order to answer the question: how to make future generation more capable of taking advantage of entrepreneurship in order to increase the wellbeing of society, taking into account the powerful role of education?

The authors have found out, that creating entrepreneurial opportunities for children and young people in schools, provides one way to blend traditional and progressive approaches, generating powerful learning that embeds both knowledge and core skills. A balance between educators and social entrepreneurs in the delivery of social enterprise education varies across the world. Different approaches are taken in different places, but it is clear that social entrepreneurship is not a subject that can simply be brought into the academic curriculum, as the teachers are not businessmen, and, in turn, social entrepreneurs are not proficient teachers. Moreover, many of the skills and gifts that make a great entrepreneur are not highly valued within a traditional school environment.

The very concept of education was once a social innovation now it is a human right. Meaningful changes should also be done to the perception of business, which should not be purely measured by the income. By drawing together the vision of social entrepreneurs and the expertise of teachers with far-sighted funding and rigorous research, the ground can be laid for systemic change on a global scale.

To research the field, describe and provide with recommendations, authors of “Social Entrepreneurships in Education” have conducted a literature review, conducted short questionnaires amongst education professionals and social entrepreneurs and in depth interviews with more than 30 leading thinkers on social entrepreneurship and education.

The result of the study can be found in here or on British Council webpage.

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Messengers with Features for Business

Three effective messaging tools are presented this time for you to try and make communication within your teams faster, more interactive and effective. Less known than Slack or Trello, however not less effective and to some even more attractive – these are Chanty, Cisco Webex Teams and Fleep, which keep distant teams together, integrate and share.

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Chanty is a business messenger, positioned as an alternative to Slack, one of the most known project management and communication tools. Similarly to its main competitor, Chanty integrates with common devices and let one to connect to multiple sources from one place. With this tool it possible to monitor activity from services like Google Drive, Twitter, Salesforce, Jira, Stripe and others, as well as receive notifications and structure the information.

For now beta version of Chanty is available for free, offering workflow and team collaboration features. It is possible to make collective decisions, create polls, transform discussions into workflows, store files and coordinate tasks by assigning team members.

Extremely useful features of the software are team audio and video calls, which can be made directly from the chat. Voice messages can also be sent with voice transcripts, providing with text version of the message and therefore allowing to increase the efficiency of communication. Chanty is able to save one’s time on predicting responses by offering relevant answers to choose from.

Moreover, the app has unlimited message history, which is searchable in case one misses the information. Filesharing supports documents, images, PDFs, spreadsheets and other file formats, using drag & drop function. The presence of emojis makes it more attractive, but “@mentions” allow to stress out significant information related to concrete persons and send them notifications. Through the settings notifications can be managed by each individual user.

Read more about Chanty here.

 

ciscoWebex_lgr

Cisco Webex Teams is an app for continuous teamwork with group messaging, video meetings, file sharing and white boarding. It allows to share the content, multimedia, presentations and entire screen with remote attendees in real-time. Shared files can be easily found right alongside the conversation stored in a cloud. Instant messaging is easy to follow up in Cisco Webex Teams, as the messages can be responded right away of flagged for follow up later. Also, information security can be managed, allowing moderators to lock the spaces. Additional features integrate Webex with other popular digital tools, for instance, Box, Google Drive, Twitter, Trello, Zendesk etc.

Integrated with Arkadin audio conferencing, Webex Teams is an ultimate online solution for audio, web and video collaboration. Team members can join the meeting with one click, without waiting for hosts to start the meeting. Additionally Webex offers sets of devices, like Webex whiteboards or video systems for rooms and desktops, for those, who value the quality of meetings.

Depending on the number of people involved in a team work, Webex offers different price plans for groups of up to 8, 25 or 100 people. More info can be found on the website.

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Fleep is a web-based messaging tool, created by former “Skypers” to fill in the gap between email and instant messaging applications. It integrates with email and allows receive emails within this app even from those, who are not registered in Fleep. The advantage of this app hides in an opportunity to communicate across organisations and regardless of team set up, so the user can be part of different teams. Even those, who are not user of fleep can participate.

Fleep also offers to store files in a cloud, share and use them from any device. Different to-do tasks can be created and managed within Fleep in order to keep people on track, as well as important messages can be pin to know where to find relevant message or what task to do. Admins functions are also available, as business communication needs to be managed. Fleep is not just another instant messaging app, as it is positioned as a viable alternative to email conversations. Fleep ID of a person looks like email address, however it is just email compatible.

Read more about Fleep here.

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Social entrepreneurship and STEM

One of the directions of social entrepreneurship, supported by many special projects and programmes, is education of children. The article focuses on the implementation of modern teaching methods, suitable for the needs of 21st century, in Latvia and Lithuania. Attractive and balanced teaching of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) to children from early age would provide an opportunity to fill the labour market of future with necessary skills and competences related to the STEM. Also, proper understanding of STEM importance in our development and sustainable living brings new social innovation ideas into life and is willing to help thousands and millions.

As study on STEM learning in Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania* has shown, there is no common understanding of STEM and its implementation in formal elementary schools, and it is based mainly on private initiatives, which are not sustainable enough, if they are not supported on a constant basis. Therefore, financial stability of business with a social mission could be a solution to the problems in education: low motivation to study, low interest in technology and engineering studies, low awareness of connection between the studies and real life, lack of creativity, inability to work in teams, lack of hands-on approach etc. Social entrepreneurship is the way of proving the need of STEM implementation and a great outsourcing opportunity for modern schools and families, which lack own resources to ensure STEM oriented education for their children. For now, STEM learning is more accessible in bigger cities as an informal of non-formal education, which is offered in after-schools lessons, scientific theatres or sessions, science centres, technological and scientific competitions and exhibitions etc. Mainly STEM activities are offered by NGOs, private enterprises, sometimes with the support of local governmental institutions, private technical elementary and high schools and other educational entities.

As a social enterprises, STEM educational centres are still in the very beginning of the movement, as not everybody is familiar with the benefits of STEM as a teaching concept. However, there are some, which develop their social businesses for children STEM education, attracting support of private and public funds, participating in different start-up-related activities, social business incubators, accelerators, competitions, conferences etc. In the context of three Baltic countries, we have found the following examples of social enterprises in STEM education:

School of Robotics, Latvia

 

School of Robotics is an educational project developed by Latvian social enterprise AgirVision. Apart from various technological solutions, enterprise offer educational activities for pupils in the fields of robotics. It started with the activity of Kaspars Čaba, who developed robots as a hobby and inspired by his sons, which resulted in investments into new robots and cooperation with the local school in Ikšķile, Latvia. The first group of children willing to participate in 28424864_555496044827825_4223260998053970502_orobotics lessons was formed and since then this initiative has grown into the social enterprise, which has subsidiaries in 5 schools of Latvia, already offers more lessons to other schools, as well as plans to open new subsidiaries.

The School of Robotics aims to create sustainable network of schools, where pupils aged 7-12 years would have an opportunity to acquire knowledge and skills in robotics, implementing STEM oriented learning, like basics of magnetism, electricity etc. Therefore enterprise encourage school teachers of math and physics to collaborate and initiate afterschool activities in robotics, providing with necessary methodological materials, equipment and trainings for teachers and pupils.

                                                             Picture source: https://www.facebook.com/agirvisionrobotuskola/

bit&Byte, Lithuania

 

bit&Byte is a social enterprise in Lithuania, which offers programming classes for children without previousgg experience in this field. Company transforms natural curiosity of 7-12 years old children into real abilities to think logically, work in teams and learn  each from other, as well as solve problems in creative way, which are important elements of STEM learning. Social enterprise teaches basics of programming in a groups, combining them with experimentation and challenges, not only in Lithuanian, but also in English and German. Children learn how to experiment with programming, develop apps, microcomputers, music, graphic design, games and try out different gadgets. Also bit&Byte organizes some demonstrations and classes in elementary schools in order to create an interest of children in programming, engineering and other fields of STEM.

 Picture source: https://www.facebook.com/bitByteAkademija/

Laboratorium.lv, Latvia

 

Laboratorium.lv is educational and entertaining social enterprise, that offers educational classes, theatre performances, programs for holidays and special events, that are fully dedicated to exciting sciences. Laboratorium.lv has participated in Reach forslide_192_1491342062 Change incubator for social enterprises and gained recognition as one of the best “Entrepreneur of a Good Will 2017” (“Labās gribas uzņēmējs 2017”). Offered activities are meant for children older than 5 years and are aimed at engaging children into science. During the working days Laboratorium.lv organizes weekly lessons in physic and chemistry, but on Saturdays and Sundays offers attractive science theatre performances dedicated to different scientific topics, such as ”The Secrets of Sounds”, ”What Every Pupil Need to Know”, ”Short Circuit”, ”Fiery Science” etc. All activities are adjusted to three different age groups – children, adolescents and adults, so the events and performances organized by the social enterprise are not targeted on children only. Adults and whole companies are also interested in scientific shows – for private of commercial purposes.

Picture source: http://www.laboratorium.lv/

ZINOO centre, Latvia

 

ZINOO is a science centre for children, whole families and school classes, which offers interactive expositions for learning mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, engineering and eksponati2_90other STEM-related subjects in a fun way. It was created with the support of EEA/Norway grants in 2011 and since then has developed four subsidiaries in different cities of Latvia.

ZINOO centre offers exhibitions, sumer camps, lessons about different topics of physics, recycling, robotics and other for private groups of school classes. Also social enterprise organises parties for children or adults with attractive science shows, as well as “Curiosity Days in School” as an outbound whole day event.

Additionally, if offers free of charge entrance for disabled people, as well as reduced tickets in a framework of cooperation with other socially responsible businesses in Latvia.

Picture source: https://www.zinoo.lv

 

*study within Erasmus+ project “Teachers and pupils STEM competence development in elementary school”, conducted in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia will be available in autumn 2018).