Signaling Ownership

I had a conversation yesterday with a Maine angel who previously worked in one of the state's innovation programs. "A key issue," she tells me, "is that all of the state programs want to own the entrepreneur, in order to be able to claim their success and demonstrate a good ROI." As such, the programs compete rather than complement; silos form and the ecosystem of support that the entrepreneur really needs to succeed is damaged. Interestingly enough, Saul Kapln called this in his keynote address at the Maine Innovation Economy Summit.

The social innovation space is guilty of a similar issue. Any good social entrepreneur could be claimed by Ashoka, TED, the Acumen Fund, the Skoll Foundation, etc. etc. At GlobalGiving, we called many of these talented individuals "Triple Crown Winners." In the social space, these individuals become "product" which build brand and promise, and demonstrate a good SROI. Same problem, though, while the reputation aspects are important for the entrepreneur's credibility, the competition driven by ownership may damage the complete support the entrepreneur needs.

The human driver is probably a mix of ownership, meaning, and belonging (as well as, of course, the ongoing effort to build a parallel with the private sector ROI). It is a similar set of drivers that, in the retail philanthropic space, find nonprofits creating micro-donation options, e.g. $3 will educate a child in Burma. While helpful for giving the donor a sense of meaning and contribution, it is likely an inaccurate outcome, because the costs of educating children are likely fixed, and $3 is meaningless without the other, say, $299,997 (there are a host of other issues here as well, e.g. $3/child may buy one level of education and $6/child may buy another).

It creates an interesting design challenge, how do we reward the investment and signal ownership without derailing collaboration and the role of the ecosystem in getting any one innovation off the ground?

I'll be interested to see how Kickstarter and Profounder (both enable crowdfunding for private ventures) manage this challenge.