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Team Notes
- 1 Week of Learning...
- A Collaborative Journey + U
- A First Person Account of Unlawful Detention
- All good things start with a prototype...
- Amnesty Challenge Concepts Continue to Evolve
- Amnesty Challenge Tech Showcase
- Amnesty OpenSTORM: Tokyo
- Announcing IDEO's Make-a-thon
- Announcing our Vibrant Cities Winning Concepts
- Announcing our Voting Challenge Shortlist
- Bone Marrow Challenge: Winners Announced!
- Community Champion Shares Clues on Connecting
- Congratulating Sony + Open Planet Ideas
- Congratulations to the Amnesty Winning Concepts!
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- Designing in Low-Income Communities
- Evaluating the Impact Challenge
- Evaluating the Bone Marrow Challenge
- Getting Ready to Roll at the Ideas Festival
- GMC Reflections by Sally Madsen
- Grant Funding to Improve Election Accessibility
- Ideas Festival Chit-chat
- Impact Challenge Winners Announced
- Inspiration Phase: Learning for Innovation
- Inspiration Phase: The Low Down
- Inspirational Interlude
- Introducing our Amnesty International Challenge
- Launching Realisation
- Live Event Alert! Grameen Webcast
- Local Food Challenge: Top 20 Ideas
- Open Planet Ideas - Development Day Thoughts
- OpenIDEATOR Insight: Ashwin Gopi
- OpenIDEATOR Insight: Cansu Akarsu
- OpenIDEATOR Insight: Charlotte Fliegner
- OpenIDEATOR Insight: Jason George
- OpenIDEATOR Insight: Juan Cajiao
- OpenIDEATOR Insight: Louise Wilson
- OpenIDEATOR Insight: Luz Alba Gallo
- OpenIDEATOR Insight: Midori Kurokawa
- OpenIDEATOR Insight: Mike McDearmon
- OpenIDEATOR Insight: Sarah Fathallah
- OpenIDEATOR Insight: Stefan Ritter
- OpenIDEO Celebrates Social Business Day
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- OpenIDEO Intern Insight: Anne Riechert
- OpenIDEO in the Classroom
- Out in the Open
- Pathways to Impact
- Voting Challenge: Personas for Concepts
- Priorities and Sanitation
- Q&A with Amnesty International
- Q&A with Grameen Creative Lab
- Voting Challenge: Q&A with ITIF
- Q&A with Oxfam's Ian Sullivan
- Vibrant Cities Challenge: Q&A with Phillip Cooley
- Q&A with Stanford's Katie Pfeiffer
- The Rules of Brainstorming
- Social Business Challenge Top 20
- Grameen Social Business Challenge: Winners Announced
- Synthesising the Maternal Health Challenge
- Synthesizing the Bone Marrow Challenge
- The Cost of Doing Business
- Refinement Phase: The Lowdown
- Unveiling the 20 Finalists for our Maternal Health Challenge
- Voting Challenge: Using Themes for Concepting
- Announcing our Vibrant Cities Challenge Top 20
- Announcing Voting Challenge Winning Concepts
- Web Start-up Challenge: Q&A with European Commission
- Announcing our Web Start-up Challenge Shortlist
- Welcome!
- Welcome to the Amnesty Refinement Phase
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Patterns
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Guest Bloggers
- Going Open
- “We’re Spent”
- A step backward
- “We apologize for the interruption in service”
- Design renews its relationship with science
- Davos posts
- Permission to Innovate
- Checks and balances
- Design nations
- Steal this idea
- The future of the book
- TEDxGR – Reflections
- Communities: It’s not always about size, but about depth
- Getting inspired from Analogies
- A Perfect Match – A Social Media Love Story – video
- A Perfect Match – A Social Media Love Story
- Make an impact on Bone Marrow Donation
- Reflections on the i20
- OpenIDEO, how can you tap your employees and customer’s latent creativity?
- Innovating for Affordable Private Schools
- OpenIDEO's First Tweetup
- OpenIDEO Tweet-ups
- Where Do You Ideate?
- New Feature: Inspiration Assignments
- Introducing the Collaboration Map
- We're at 10,000 users!
- Visualising the Community DNA for OpenIDEO
- Designing for an ecosystem – OpenIDEO’s user engagement framework
- Some design thoughts behind OpenIDEO
- Why I think OpenIDEO is important
Field Notes
Inspiring content from across OpenIDEO & IDEO's other work.
Recent blog entries
Jun
20th
2011
Q&A with Grameen Creative Lab
For those who might not know, what is the Grameen Creative Lab (GCL)?
GCL is a Joint Venture between Professor Muhammad Yunus, founder of the Grameen Bank and Nobel Peace Prize winner, and the German serial entrepreneur, Hans Reitz. It is in itself a social business that aims to accelerate and spread the Social Business movement around the world. Its activities are concentrated in three main areas: raising awareness, creating better understanding of Social Business through creative workshops and academic research, and generating social impact through Joint Ventures and partnerships.
Why is Caldas, Colombia an important location for Social Business and for GCL?
Caldas presents an incredible diversity of climates and very fertile lands. It also has five large universities with about 25,000 students. Despite these opportunities, Caldas is also facing important social and economic issues – including a struggling economy that has been hit hard by the drop of coffee prices and the loss of many industries.
Our partnership with Caldas began when the governor of Caldas, Mario Aristizabal, reached out to Professor Yunus at the Microcredit Summit in Cartagena in 2009. The Governor asked Professor Yunus to bring his poverty reduction methodology to Caldas. After learning more about Caldas, Professor Yunus agreed that Social Business offered great potential for improving the whole region’s poverty record and rebuilding its economy. In cooperation with the Caldas Group for Poverty Reduction, GCL operations began in Caldas in 2010 with a focus on four main areas: Education, Housing, Nutrition and Health.
Our whole program is called the Holistic Social Business Movement of Caldas, which combines a micro-credit organization, a Social Business Fund and Joint Venture programs ensuring synergies between them. Over time, we hope to expand our operations to become the Latin American Holistic Social Business Movement.
Our OpenIDEO community is quite the motivated, passionate bunch. What can they do if they'd like to get more involved in Social Business?
There are plenty of ways that you can have your own social impact through social business.
The very first one is to become a social entrepreneur yourself! We believe Social Business can have positive impacts on communities around the world. And we will certainly be looking for entrepreneurs here, in Caldas, to consider how we might implement some of the ideas that you come up with in this Challenge.
Another way to help is to join our team at Grameen Caldas. We are always looking for enthusiastic and motivated volunteers to support us in a variety of ways, from financial expertise to web-design and communications. These un-paid volunteer opportunities generally last for 3 months, but can easily be extended. We'll also help provide housing for volunteers during their stay.
Plus, it turns out we are also looking for the CEO of Grameen Caldas! If you’re interested to learn more, send us your resume and a cover letter to recruitmentgrameencaldas@gmail.com or email us your questions.
We're always looking for great examples of local social change stories. What's your favorite Social Business story from your work in Caldas?
As a matter of fact, we just uploaded our very first Inspiration about Social Business! Head on over to the Inspiration phase and check it out!
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