Venture philanthropy likewise focuses on building the capacity of organizations to fuel success and scale by not only providing grant support over an extended time period, but also by cultivating and leveraging other sources of funding, and business and personal networks; and providing specialized expertise. A focus on results is accompanied by a willingness to invest in the human and technological infrastructure required to define and measure outcomes, and an understanding of and appetite for the risk associated with allowing the organization to make strategic readjustments along the way. Venture philanthropy also understands, as does venture capital, that markets vary by geography, size, and other factors, and provides resources in a way that understands that scaling does not necessarily mean lock-step replication.

The Social Innovation Fund can and should find partners on the ground with experience with this kind of venture philanthropy approach, as they can help the federal government to understand how to best deploy and leverage resources, and can cultivate and play an active private sector role. The Fund’s administrators should be clear about the social results they want to achieve, while allowing their community partners to provide leadership on the methods used to achieve them. The Fund should also act as a venture investment partner itself by finding ways to use the power and reach of the federal government and the White House to proactively and creatively cultivate the necessary and wide array of public and private connections and resources that will lead to scale and success.

Our idea is to develop an healthy eco system of social innovation. one that takes a much more holistic approach. In Austin, Texas we are working exactly on that. We have organized into four symbiotic sectors.

1. The Network: The practitioners and funders and supporters. This includes the social innovators, the existing organizations supporting this i.e. Net Impact,

2. Education: Both Social innovation 101 conversation groups and academic support from two of our local universities to create white papers, put on conferences, lectures, and seminars

3. Think and do tank: This takes input from both the network and the education components and mixes them together. Sorta like a bio engineering chamber. once these ideas and data points start bouncing around and bumping into each other and some reaction happen and bonds starting to form amino acids, proteins and other dna components are added to foster the development of the new concept into an alpha version of a start up.

4. Incubator: This is where the alpha phase start ups are nurtured to beta or 1.0 state in other to be released into the market.

These four symbiotic sectors are bound together and connected via a hub.

Our website is coming pretty soon for now check here for a more detailed explanation.

http://groups.google.com/group/austinsocialinnova...

Now this is actually a good idea–not for the totality of a fund, but for a sizable fraction. Looking to the long term, there is real value in setting up a structure that will allow for high quality information to be gather over time on the characteristics of program effectiveness. Not easy, but again there is substantial learning out there from which to draw.

Otherwise, I expect we're all in agreement that evaluation needs to be as minimally budensome as possible. See e.g. essay by Brian Trelstad of Acumen in Innovations journal http://bit.ly/xQMcS.

Sorry I'll miss the investment panel as I'll be on the education panel. Looking forward to catching up afterward.

Perhaps a "change agent status" recognized by the Corporation…not unlike Americorp, but with a specific skill set and focus to help build capacity, innovate, and move what works to scale. It would allow more of a jet ski approach to our social issues rather than a cargo and cruise-liner approach. It could also target some of the talent needed to achieve the collaborative efforts around public/private partnerships.
A Megacommunity susperstars if you will.

Wish I could participate in the discussion!

Propose criteria for what works with an increased focus on results/impact rather than activities/outcomes. What works only becomes manifest through testing, iteration, lead user modification. WE are the lead users of an idea, sometimes poorly implemented by another nonprofit. If we don't allow more+BETTER nonprofits (change organizations) to emerge, we are claiming that all good ideas have been generated–all innovations exist. Which I'm pretty sure isn't true. So, let's not pull the plug on new ideas, whatever form they take.

3) Encourage collaborative, community-wide approaches. Many successful social entrepreneurs are tackling social problems with very targeted interventions, and this approach seems to be encouraged the legislation. However, we must also recognize the interconnected nature of social problems, and strengthen the social fabric in communities to have sustainable impact over time. The community funds mentioned in the legislation could provide an interesting opportunity to encourage holistic approaches. I'd like to see this include funds for community planning and capacity building. I'm also interested in the notion that two or more social entrepreneurs might team up to offer services to a community that complement one another. For instance, a program with a strong academic enrichment curriculum might team up with a sports based youth development program. This would provide a broader array of services and allow two organizations to share some of the costs involved with starting a new location.

1) Fund growth, not start-up. We are not lacking for nonprofits out there, of course; the Social Innovation Fund presents a great opportunity to grow what works. Giving significant, flexible dollars to grow promising solutions makes more sense than encouraging anyone with an interest in nonprofits to start their own.

2) Provide flexible, multi-year investments. Significant capital coming from the government for social entrepreneurship is exciting, but will need to be approached differently than most government programs to be successful. Dollars must be flexible to let organizations invest in capacity they need to grow; the Fund should be supporting results, not line items. To achieve this, contracting with a private entity or entities to do the direct investing, such as suggested in other comments here, would seem to make sense. Funding needs to be multi-year as well to produce the desired results.