Last year, I had the good fortune to attend INSEAD’s Social Entrepreneurship Program (ISEP). A few months later, I got an invitation from Hans Wahl, Senior Associate Director of ISEP to attend a Leadership Roundtable/Social Entrepreneurship Conference/ISEP Reunion in Istanbul. Who could say no to that? And so I – arms twisted :p – accepted, and I must say that it was such a worthwhile experience to have attended the three-day event.

Day One : ISEP Leadership Roundtable

Filipe and Hans – the ISEP program heads – facilitated a leadership roundtable wherein we had a very healthy exchange of perspectives on how the social entrepreneurship field is evolving, the social entrepreneurship “path” (entrepreneur > manager > “evangelist”?), the key challenges and opportunities, as well as a special focus on building the next generation of social entrepreneurs.

Personally, the discussion on the next generation of social entrepreneurs was the one that fascinated me the most. After all, this has been a question I’ve also been asking myself for the past year. (I for one see three options – 1. fresh graduates from other disciplines (as there isn’t a formal social enterprise degree yet), 2. NGO practitioners who’ll adopt more business skills, and 3. corporate executives/entrepreneurs who’ll be making the leap).

It was a very engaging and diverse group – from practitioners, academicians (INSEAD, Wits, Sabanci, ESSEC), social enterprise networks (Ashoka, Scwhab), and supporters.

Day Two : ISEP Social Entrepreneurship Conference

The second day was the conference proper, with most of the participants in the leadership roundtable as resource speakers :

with Wendy Ngoma who’s trying to jumpstart more social entrepreneurs in South Africa. The conference was held at Sakip Sabanci Museum, c/o partner-institution Sabanci University.

Hans Wahl, Senior Associate Director of INSEAD-Social Entrepreneurship gives the welcoming remarks.

Filipe Santos, Academic Director and Assistant Professor INSEAD-Social Entrepreneurship talks about his current studies and perspectives in social entrepreneurship. He claims that social entrepreneurs are really “simple people” who are a little bit “crazy” by nature.

The conference had mainly two formats : roundtable discussions and networking sessions. The latter was interspersed in-between the plenary sessions, wherein the resource speakers would host small cocktail-like discussions revolving on specific topics. I for one, had two opportunities to host on microfinancing and microenterprise development.

With regards to the roundtable discussions, there were three :

Roundtable 1 : Social Entrepreneurship – Innovating to Build a Better Future
L-R. Hans Wahl, Miguel Martins (IES), Florence Rizzo (Ashoka), Mirjam Schoening (Schwab Foundation), Anant Kumar (Lifespring Hospitals), Burcu Kumbel Guler (Kocaeli University), and Hulya Denizalp (Youth Tour, Social Entrepreneurship Platform of Turkey).

Roundtable 2 : Sustainable Innovation for Social Change – Towards Sustainable Livelihoods & Ending Poverty
L-R : Runa Khan (Friendship), Laila Iskandar (CID), Majid El Jarroudi (ADIVE), yours truly, (Grameen Turkey).

Roundtable 3 : Growth, Scale, and Sustainability – Lessons from a Quarter Century
L-R : Filipe Santos (INSEAD), Iman Bibars (Ashoka), Anne-Claire Pashe (l’ESSEC), Andreas Heinecke (Dialogue in the Dark), Veronica Colondam (YCAB), Ercan Tutal (AYDER), Ibrahim Betil (TOG)

To wrap-up the plenary sessions was a keynote presentation by Soralva Salti, Director of INJAZ-AL-Arabia, recepient of the Skoll Foundation Award for Social Enterpreneurship. She gave a very heartfelt and compelling talk about her experience in building her social enterprise, which ‘harnesses the mentorship of Arab business leaders to help inspire a culture of entrepreneurialism and business innovation among Arab youth‘; She spoke of how she had to persevere through years despite all the challenges, and fulfillment as its own reward as the social mission continues to be achieved.

Keynote address by Soralva Salti

To wrap-up the conference, the organizers had prepared a short video :

Day Three : ISEP Reunion

The third day was for the ISEP Reunion – basically, all alumni from the previous ISEP runs were invited for a day’s worth of activities.

The first morning session was a discussion on INSEAD’s Social Networking Platform, a tool spearheaded by Christine Driscoll. It gives social entrepreneurs a common online space to have discussions around topics of interest as well as share resources and information.

The second session was in preparation for the field work activity. Hans shared a tool that is gaining more and more ground for social enterprises – SROI, or Social Return On Investment. While traditional enterprises look only at financial ROI, social enterprises also factor-in their social impact measures.

We then went to the field in order to apply the tool by interviewing representative social entrepreneurs.

The venue was in an event organized by Turkish Social Entrepreneur Ercan Tutal, whose Alternative Life Association works with the differently abled :

After the event, we headed off for a late Turkish lunch :

L-R Esther Verburg (Made-By), Moi, Hans Wahl, Wendy Ngoma, and Veronica Colondam.

We went back to our plenary venue to process the SROI experience as well as go through a discussion led by Christine on Venture Philantropy. This was particularly interesting especially since LGTVP – one such institution engaged in this – had invested in Rags2Riches late last year.

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All-in-all, it was certainly great to have experienced a jampacked 3 days with such awesome people in such a wonderful city. Until the next ISEP conference!

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Postscript : By the way, an interesting thing also happened to me : during one of the networking sessions, a local TV personality Ozlem Denizmen got so intrigued by the story of Hapinoy that she interviewed me by the Bosphorus sea. Here’s the unedited video which found its way to Turkish television (scratch one off the bucket list! :p)

Front Row L-R : April Culina, Erika Tatad, Jonalene Perdigon, Maricar Suello, Allaine de la Cruz
2nd Row L-R : Nick Geaga, Richie Magpayo, RG Salazar, Mark Ruiz, Carissa Villanueva, AJ Rodriguez
3rd Row L-R : Bam Aquino, TJ Agulto, Mike Perez, JP Melgazo

Thanks to RIIR Partner-Designer Amina Aranaz-Alunan and her students at SOFA for exploring designs for Rags2Riches!

Date : August 3, 2009 Venue : Eastwood Mall