CE Solutions: News > Organizational

News > Organizational

January 2010

Greg Van Kirk will begin part time work as “Entrepreneur in Residence” at Columbia University’s “Center for Technology, Innovation and Community Engagement” in January. The primary focus of this work will be to launch a collaboration with Microsoft in order to support both our own CE Solutions/Social Entrepreneur Corps work as well as the work of other social innovators throughout the world. Greg will be teaching, creating collaborative opportunities, designing projects and leading execution.

Through Social Entrepreneur Corps we have been invited to attend the Clinton Global Initiative – University which will take place in Miami, Florida this coming April. George Glickley will be attending.

December 2009

Greg Van Kirk has been selected to take part in the inaugural Ashoka Globalizer program to promote and implement our MicroConsignment Model on a world-wide basis. Ashoka created this initiative “to identify the most effective international social entrepreneurs within the Ashoka network of 2,500 social entrepreneurs in order to expand their impact to achieve global scale through an enhanced marketing and dissemination effort.” Greg has been asked to convene with the other “Globalizer” Fellows from around the world in Vienna, Austria this coming April.

August 2009

Greg Van Kirk has been asked to write a case study article on our MicroConsignment Model for Innovations Journal. This piece is designed to tell the story of our MicroConsignment Model and describe its origins, appropriateness and impact as a new and unique way to delivery essential products and services to the rural poor in developing countries. Dr. Brett Smith, who is the Director of the Center for Social Entrepreneurship at Miami University, has written a discussant piece to accompany this. Innovations is a quarterly journal about entrepreneurial solutions to global challenges. It is published by MIT Press, and jointly hosted at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government, George Mason University's School of Public Policy, and MIT's Legatum Center for Development and Entrepreneurship. Greg has been asked to present the article at a global conference of over 100 social entrepreneurs in Hyderabad, India in mid February.

We launched a new website initiative called www.invennovations.com. Invennovations.com is a free resource designed to capture and disseminate the inventions and innovations being created and implemented around the world to serve vulnerable populations. It is an effort to support those working in the field in developing countries as they seek to facilitate positive impact at the “Base of the Pyramid”. The hope is that this site will bring together passionate development professionals working in all parts of the field, connect inventors with organizations, designers with distributors, and be a resource for anyone who wants to learn more about what is going on in international development. Greg Van Kirk had the opportunity to present this resource at a recent conference in Sao Paolo, Brazil to great reception.

January 2009

We have launched a successful pilot initiative in Ecuador to replicate our MicroConsignment Model work and test a number of the pilot programs. We have encountered strong success and are expanding our efforts in 2010.