Socap09 - day 2

Post originally published here

Lots of conversations today at Socap09, and a lot of the same questions from last year still unresolved: how to get projects funded, how to scale, how to measure impact, how to better account for intangible assets, etc... We are still experimenting, and sharing results from here and there, trying to extract the lessons learned so that hopefully next year we can show a little more progress.

Meanwhile the highlight for me today came from the discussion on "hubs": building communities anchored around a space. Nothing fundamentally new, incubators have been around for quite some time, except that we are not talking about real estate, but rather we are talking about establishing geographical landmarks as anchors for local communities to gather around the idea of changing the world. A small difference in the narrative and in the pricing model, but a huge difference in the type of community you establish and the results you can expect.

And it seems to me that it is a very good opportunity to start fresh with people and their dreams (their BeDo, as I discovered yesterday) gathering to help each other and share experience.

There are several examples of such concept implemented in various places, but the best I have seen so far is The Hub. A good place for entrepreneurs to hang out.

I have been working on my side on the Entrepreneur Commons, and I see a lot of synergies between hubs and Entrepreneur Commons. If the Entrepreneur Commons is a community anchored around a fund for seed capital, and hubs are communities anchored around geograhical landmarks, then what we have really are 2 pilars upon which we can build strong ventures. Something that I intend to explore further...

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