The Grameen Creative Lab (GCL) and NUS Entrepreneurship Centre have formed a partnership, known as GCL@NUS.
The objective of the GCL@NUS Initiative for Social Business is to leverage the global resources and networks of the Grameen Creative Lab to promote and incubate innovation-based social businesses in Singapore that have the potential to generate scalable, sustainable social impacts in Emerging Markets, especially social groups at Bottom of the Pyramid.
What is Social Business?
While maximizing profits and financial returns have become the key driving force for economic activities in the world, social problems continue to increase globally, to some extent even driven by the negative impact of profit maximizing businesses. It becomes obvious that we need to question whether people should benefit the economy, or the economy benefit the people.
How can we redesign at least parts of the business world in order to solve problems rather than creating them? How can we mitigate greed and mistrust, but at the same time also use proven business methodologies and technological innovations to solve prevalent social problems? One idea to address these questions is the concept of social business, which is spreading rapidly around the world.
Just as many for-profit entrepreneurs and corporations have exploited business and technological innovations to provide new products and services for the higher income population segments in the advanced economies, many socially-minded entrepreneurs and corporations are creating new, innovation-driven social businesses to make sustainable social impacts among the poor in the developing world.
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