Institute For The Future

"The SEVEN Fund $50k VINE Project: Developing Investment Indicators for Emerging Market SMEs"

Fascinating combination of Social Entrepreneurship, Social Venture Capital, and Open Innovation. They've devised a very unique competition that is both open in nature and serves the bottom of the pyramid. Using an open competition design, they hope to tap the collective expertise of many to develop a new index to evaluate potential investments in emerging economies. If this type of competition actually works, they could go beyond the current knowledge brokering done by existing Open Innovation intermediaries (InnoCentive, NineSigma, yet2.com, yourencore, and others).

 

Here's the link:  www.sevenfund.org/vine/