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Blog 2 - Platform series.
Your customer of days past was in the dark. If they purchased an item, they had no idea what the profit margin may be. Endeavours to understand where the best price may be was an onerous task. Consumer responses to new and more competitive products were not broadly available.
Blog 1 - Platform series.
Just take a look at where disruption has come from over the recent 10 years or so. Do you think taxi, hotel and music disruption are about new products? They’re not, they’re about platforms.
The online community imperative for B2B brands
Blog 4 in the 2021 series.
Communities are without a doubt becoming more and more critical to business, to civil society and non-government organisations, and to government. For the past few years, we’ve curated content and written prolifically about collaboration. A few months ago I decided on a reboot as collaboration is a strong outcome of shared-purpose communities and it seemed prudent to, in some ways rewind to the basics and in other ways fast forward to how communities are built, nurtured, measured and sustained.
Lego had helped kids build cool stuff since the 1930s but they may not have built their firewalls quite as well as their product. In 2005 their software tool, the Lego Factory, got hacked by some tech-savvy LEGO enthusiasts.
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How should civil society and other interested stakeholders engage with the SADC-EU Economic Partnership Agreement, if at all? What should be the form and content of that engagement?
The first regional economic partnership agreement (EPA) in Africa came into effect in February 2018, between the European Union and the Southern African Development Community (SADC), after years of negotiations and in the face of anti-EPA campaigning by SADC civil society since the 2000s.
Dipalesa Mpye (Social Investment Specialist)
As more and more funders make the shift from traditional grantmaking to investing in strategic, system-shifting initiatives, conversations around scaling the impact of flagship programmes and successful pilot projects have dominated meeting agendas. The idea of scaling is not a new one. In the for-profit world, expansion of market reach, product offerings and operations form a fundamental part of the business case from the outset.
In the non-profit world, we see a growing base of resources ranging from “how-to scale” guides for non-profit leadership; conferences and courses focused on scaling initiatives; and even the steady development of innovative financing models. Despite this, examples of successfully scaled high-impact social interventions remain the exception rather than the rule in the South African context.
Organisations remain under enormous pressure to monitor and evaluate their social investment programmes for learning purposes and adaptive management. They are also often faced with heavy workloads due to conflicting demands from multiple donors with different contractual and reporting requirements. Despite these pressures, non-profit organisations must demonstrate the impact and value of their social initiatives in order to secure funding support and evolve. Monitoring and evaluation (M&E) has additionally come to be recognised as an essential component of social investment as it allows funders to meaningfully assess the impact of their work.
Like me, from time to time, you possibly feel that the pace of innovation is pretty insane and sometimes even overwhelming. In just a few years we’ve probably changed over 50% of the way in which we consume stuff. The Collaborative Era thinking, that ‘access’ triumphs over ‘ownership’, coupled with the management of excess, has driven disruption in many areas including, transport and accommodation, among others. With access to a world of talent, the acquisition of skills and services in business today is so radically different and would have been unimaginable just 10 years ago. Creative destruction caused by technology is rampant. Are you still asking WHY you need a community?
