Resources to find midterm topic

To identify an organization or idea to profile for your midterm paper, below are a list of links that can quickly help you identify interesting business innovations. You may be frustrated at the relatively sparse detail that is often available on these organizations. Do the best you can to find the data you need to assess the business viability and development impact of the innovation; where you cannot find additional information be explicit in the paper about what more you would want to know to make an assessment, how you would efficiently gather the information and how different results from the new information would affirm or refute your hypotheses about the innovation.

• UN's Growing Inclusive Markets program has a resource center that includes case studies on business innovations sortable by country and theme.
• Changemakers ran a competition on Leveraging Business for Social Change that should have many relevant examples. Their G-20 Finance Challenge also has some enterprises profiled that would be relevant.
• The NextBillion website that WRI runs (as part of the program that includes the market sizing data we looked at in class) is a comprehensive place for dicsussions and descriptions of businesses.
• Many of the fund managers and non-profits who work in this space also describe specific investee companies in their reports and onlines. You can either profile an investee company, or the fund as a business innovation itself. Good places to start would be SEAF, E&Co. (especially if you're interested in clean energy and development), Acumen, IGNIA ,Root Capital, Grassroots Business Fund, GroFin, Business Partners, Actis (larger-scale, more commercial business opportunities). The development finance institutions (World Bank, IFC, Norfund, FMO, etc.) all have websites with some anecdotal examples of investee companies and social and financial impact reporting.

If you find additional online resources that are useful in your search, please post here so we can all know about them.

--Prof. Bugg-Levine