Business is a tool, its how you use that tool that matters. Michael Porter, the Harvard Business School Professor in the Ted Talk video below, argues that business can be the tool to solve the world’s greatest problems. We all know the social problems: childhood obesity, poverty, water scarcity, poor healthcare, climate change. Usually, we look to NGO’s—nonprofit charitable organizations—or government to solve these problems. Often, however, nonprofit work falls disappointingly short, and government . . . . well try calling the IRS (or any other federal government agency) today and see how far you get. What’s getting in the......
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Articles |
August 27, 2013
International Trademark Planning: A Brief History of International Trademark Law
As our previous post on “Making Your Intangibles, Tangible” illustrated, trademarks function as indicators of the source and quality for both goods and services. They also serve as the prime...
Articles, Benefit Corporation, Dispute Resolution, Social Enterprise, Social Entrepreneur, social entrepreneurship, Social Purpose Corporation |
August 9, 2013
The Health of Hybrid Entities: How many benefit corporations and social purpose corporations are out there? A comparison and data analysis on the SPC’s relative success.
Last month, over at SocentLaw, I came across an interesting blog post by Haskell Murray explaining a collaborative attempt to quantify how many benefit corporations exist across the US. The...
Articles |
July 19, 2013
Making your intangibles, tangible. Part 2: Trademarks.
In this four-part series we’re discussing how to increase the value of your company by better quantifying and protecting your company’s intangible intellectual property. Of the areas we’ll cover, a...
Articles, Copyright, Intellectual property, Venture Capital |
June 11, 2013
Making your intangibles, tangible. Part 1: Copyrights.
In this four part series, we’re discussing how to increase the value of your company by better quantifying and protecting your company’s intellectual property rights. An investor or prospective...
Articles |
June 7, 2013
How can I increase the value of my business? Making your intangibles, tangible.
About two months ago at the “Hot Topics in Business Law” CLE put on by the King County Bar Association, I was immediately struck by what a fellow speaker, Todd...
Articles, Benefit Corporation, Flexible Purpose Corporation, nonprofit, Projects, SEC, Social Entrepreneur, social entrepreneurship, Social Purpose Corporation, Venture Capital |
May 7, 2013
Patagonia Launches In House Fund
There is lots of movement in the social impact investment space lately it seems. Yesterday on Businessweek.com there was an interesting piece on Patagonia, California’s first Benefit Corporation, and its...
501c3, Articles, charitable solicitation, Crowdfunding, Crowdfunding Act, L3C, nonprofit, Social Enterprise, Social Entrepreneur, social entrepreneurship, tax-exempt |
April 19, 2013
"The Way We Think About Charity is Dead Wrong" by Dan Pallotta
Many people have a misconception about fundraising costs and charitable giving. Too many donors ask to see the numbers on a charity’s overhead and how much of their donated dollar...
501c3, Articles, charitable solicitation, nonprofit, tax-exempt, Unified Registration Statement |
April 10, 2013
Online Charitable Solicitations: 4 Tips for Using the "Donate Here" Button
Your shiny new website is up and running. And, like most tax-exempt nonprofit organizations, your website prominently displays a “donate here” button. What better way to solicit charitable donations from...
Articles |
March 11, 2013
The Overview Effect and Social Impact
Often – I find that the best ways of understanding and explaining social entrepreneurship comes from examples outside of the legal and/or start-up worlds. This time, however, I found an...