PAR in Organizations: A Small Business study « Participatory Action Research & Organizational Change. I am fascinated in exploring how PAR might be applied within organizations and outside its traditional domains of development, education and health. What does PAR look like within, for example, a business? One example is seen in the work of Chris Street and Darren Meister* who used PAR in helping a small business manage change. The researchers decided on a PAR approach because: Street and Meister outline an evolving research process identifying how each stage of the research process built on data generated in the previous stage.
Challenges with PAR Street and Meister identify some issues with PAR. But how does this project focused on a CEO called Nick and his 5 year retirement plan connect with the work of Swantz in Tanzania (see post) – are we really talking about the same research method just applied in a different setting or are there fundamental differences? Street, C., & Meister, D. 2004. Like this: Like Loading... Participatory design. Participatory design (originally Cooperative Design, also known in the USA as co-design) is an approach to design attempting to actively involve all stakeholders (e.g. employees, partners, customers, citizens, end users) in the design process to help ensure the result meets their needs and is usable. The term is used in a variety of fields e.g. software design, urban design, architecture, landscape architecture, product design, sustainability, graphic design, planning, and even medicine as a way of creating environments that are more responsive and appropriate to their inhabitants' and users' cultural, emotional, spiritual and practical needs.
It is one approach to placemaking. It has been used in many settings and at various scales. Participatory design is an approach which is focused on processes and procedures of design and is not a design style. Definition[edit] History[edit] History in Scandinavia[edit] Fields of participatory design[edit] Community planning and placemaking[edit] Participatory credit project - creditwatch. Small enterprises in the agriculture, trade and services sectors are most susceptible to changes towards financial sector liberalization. The asset bases of small businesses often fail to meet the stricter collateral requirements of the new market driven financial system. The individual loan requirements in these enterprises also routinely fall short of the revised minimum prescribed. Keeping the interests of small borrowers in mind should be an overriding aspect of a successful financial sector reform agenda. Giving voice to and creating space for small enterprises and the poor in the operational policies of credit institutions are essential elements of all civil societies.
Consulting small businesses and the poor and enabling them to participate in designing credit delivery can also reduce the default risk through better ownership and shared objectives. Focus Project logframe. Participatory Business Models « co-creatingcultures. Since last year, I have been paying special attention to existing business models within the creative & cultural industries as I joined A+C+C CoCreación. I was especially interested in business models related to crowdsourcing/open innovation because they lean on “participation”, which is the focus of our investigation. I would like to sum up in this post the existing business models that use crowdsourcing and draw a parallel with the level of participation. I will refer then to the different levels of participation detailed in a previous post. Donation-based business model enables users to donate money to help sustain a project or enterprise, like Wikipedia or Radiohead.
The key to make it a sustainable business model is the community: having a strong community of fans is necessary to live only thank to its donations. The organization must find the right correlation between the community volume and the average sum of money received per person for the project or enterprise. Social Business – *The* Ecosystem. As I am about to finish off my last round of business trips that I started by mid-May, and which I am completing beginning of next week till after the summer, having taken me to some wonderful cities like Rotterdam, Seville, Barcelona, London, Milan, Boston, Madrid and Seville again, I just couldn’t help reflecting on a relatively recent blog post put together by the always inspiring David Armano that I can surely summarise it as perhaps one of the best reads you will do this year around the topic of Social Business.
Yes, that powerful. Why? Well, more than anything else, because it’s probably one of the best, most comprehensive reads you will do to find out where Social Business comes from, where we are nowadays and what lies ahead as our next challenge. Main key thought? A new reality: despite the good number of years that have just gone past, we are just getting started.
Or this other one, just as good, if not even more powerful altogether: Very shortsighted if you ask me. Discuss Subsidized Labor. The Sharing Economy. It’s 8:30 a.m. in Silicon Valley, and Neal Gorenflo is already busy sharing. Inside his Mountain View town house, just a few short blocks from the Caltrain station where commuters pour out each morning on their way to Google, Gorenflo hands over his 15-month-old son, Jake, to a nanny he shares with his neighbor. At a local coffee shop, he logs on to a peer-to-peer banking site called Lending Club to make a series of small loans to someone planning a wedding, another starting a pet business, and a guy named Pat who wants to move. After biking down to the station, he drags his ancient Peugeot onto the train to San Francisco, where he hops into a Prius he’s reserved for a few hours from City CarShare, a not-for-profit version of Zipcar.
After driving out to Berkeley for a tour of a cohousing community, he finally lands at a shared office space in SoMa, from which he works once a week. Gorenflo does, of course, still own stuff. AirBnB, on the other hand, had to create demand. He laughs. Yelp or the Better Business Bureau. The Future of Business Ratings. What ratings do people trust? Where do consumers go when it’s time to review a local business? As more and more consumers become socially savvy, more and more of them will consult services like Yelp versus the Better Business Bureau. Of course, this is not a knock on the BBB, but things have been going this way for a while now. As people, we tend to trust our peers more than organizations. We read product reviews written by consumers just like us and place more value on those ratings than those provided by organizations and publications.
This shift in trust applies to businesses now as well. With that said, let’s look at the difference between a rating on the BBB and one on Yelp. The Better Business Bureau A quick search of the BBB for “Phil Sandoval’s Mexican Restaurante” will provide a rundown of this business. Yelp.com Now let’s see what we can find out about Phil Sandoval’s Mexican Restaurante on Yelp. What it Means to Your Business? I’ve got more on Yelp coming soon. ShareThis. Good Cause Currency Services - Global Ethical Brokerage is a Charitable Foreign Exchange Company. Global Ethical Brokerage is a British-based Foreign Exchange specialist that adds value to business ventures while also fulfilling an ethical criteria.
Operating out of Kent in South East England, the brokerage offers immediate currency exchange at fixed exchange rates to allow companies that regularly make payments overseas the ability to do so at an affordable price. Furthermore, a portion of the company's profits are reinvested into local, regional and national charitable causes to allow its clients to contribute to their Corporate Social Responsibility programs. Opening an account with the Foreign Exchange brokerage ensures that the client not only is afforded with competitive rates to conduct monetary business transactions abroad but also is able to contribute to ethical causes that are making a difference. Social Business World - The First Global Social Network for Social Business. 4 Social Entrepreneurs that Are Changing the World.
There is a movement across the globe today that says solutions to society's most pressing social issues cannot be left up to the government to determine. Social entrepreneurs are business owners that decide to take on the work of engaging with social problems implementing systems that offer broad-scale change. Social Entrepreneurs That Change the World A social entrepreneur uses the principles of entrepreneurialism to develop a business venture that brings about social changes. The performance of a business is normally measured by profit and return on investment. Social entrepreneurs frequently do their work through non-profit organizations, but this does not preclude them from being profitable. These businesses go the further step of adding a social value component. Fast Company Magazine publishes an annual list of the best social entrepreneurs that fit their definition: "using the disciplines of the corporate world to tackle daunting social problems.
" ACCION International. City Year. The Top Trends that Will Reshape the World. Engage! Dr. James Canton is a wonderful author, and brings together his many brilliant ideas in his book, "The Extreme Future". His resume is long and impressive, but what is most astonishing is his way to so clearly see a vision of the future that is uncanny compared with changing technology and the unfolding events on the world stage. It's not even so much that he talks about the future, he takes you there, with excellent sample headlines for the next 20 years or case studies of possible future citizens and the issues they confront. Energy So what's the number one trend our good doctor unveils? Source: Economy Although published in 2006, this book wisely identifies the economy as the second most powerful trend for the next 20 years.
Workforce The changing workforce is trend number 3, and one prediction is already coming true. Source: Medicine. Trendwatching.com: Consumer trends and insights from around the world. Better business: acts of kindness | Money. When Paul Warner saw a stranger's comment on Facebook lamenting her nine-year-old daughter's birthday present being lost in the post, he couldn't help but take note. As the owner of traditional children's toy company wheniwasakid.co.uk, he decided to track down the woman and send her daughter a toy, free.
Warner says: "I sent her a bunny with a note saying: 'Sorry Royal Mail let you down, hopefully this will put a smile on your little girl's face.' She was completely bowled over. " It's not the first time Warner has surprised customers, or potential customers, with an unexpected act of kindness. And he's not the only one. "The really new element to this is, that via social networks, brands can now access consumers' moods, intentions, desires or frustrations as they happen, and can therefore address them in a much more personalised and timely fashion.
" For Warner, thinking up ways to surprise people with kind acts is half the fun. Welcome | Random Acts of Kindness. Business Will Change: How collective intelligence will change the way we do business. I wrote this book for every business person struggling to make sense of the changes that are sweeping through our world today. Business is changing. An unstoppable transformation is underway.
Everything about how we work -- how products are developed, marketed, sold, and supported -- will change. How companies are financed, organized and managed will change. You can choose to ignore these changes or you can embrace them. Driving this change is the rapid evolution of digital computing and communication networks and a set of facilitating applications which I refer to in this book as social technologies -- a combination of software applications, web sites, and mobile applications that are fostering the global development of cooperative communications. Even before technology played a role, sociologists had developed an understanding of the resulting collective intelligence which emerges from certain kinds of organized group communications. 15 companies that will change the world - Virgin Charter (6) - Business 2.0. Social Entrepreneurs 2011: How a Business Can Change the World.
Start a company. Change the world. It used to be that if you wanted to make a difference, you joined a nonprofit. And if you wanted to make money, you launched a business. These days, it's not so simple. More nonprofits are being run like fast-growth start-ups. And more traditional companies are being built around social missions. In the pages that follow, we shine a light on this new universe of social entrepreneurship. Social Entrepreneur Profiles The Case for More (Not Less) Regulation As the founder and CEO of a West Michigan plastics manufacturer employing a thousand people, Fred Keller lives by rules. How Dave Eggers Is Making Learning Fun Dave Eggers and Ninive Calegari, the co-founders of 826 National, thought they had found the perfect spot for their drop-in writing center. An Eye Bank Bets on Best Practices Finding Jobs for Ex-offenders Brenda Palms Barber, Chicago's Queen of Second Chances, is dedicated to finding jobs for former prison inmates.
The Benefits of Going Organic. Upload & Share PowerPoint presentations and documents. 100 ways to kill a concept. 5 Bootstrapping Ideas for Startup Businesses: Do More with Less Money. Learn essential skills for bootstrapping your startup business. This article outlines five categories that you need to have fully in check before embarking on your venture alone. Bootstrapping Your Startup BusinessBootstrapping a startup business comes down to determination and drive. You will need to stretch every dollar and maximize every investment. Control the cash flow. Complexity Theory: Actions for a Better World. "Complexity in action is a hundred, no, a thousand, no, a million times greater than complexity in theory. " (paraphrase of an old Taoist meditation saying) Prologue: Looking the Other Way Creating a new systemic science is a necessary, but not sufficient, step in moving forward the quality of our world.
Historically, all real progress has needed a further step. That step has been the employment of the knowledge gained by science to make differences in our lives. In the previous three waves of non-systemic science these improvements have taken materialist form, we have had the industrial revolution, the technological revolution and currently have the information revolution - all these have required us to create new devices, whether production machines, new materials or communication systems, freeing us from labour, from need and from ignorance. The New Revolution In terms of productivity this wave will far exceed all the others combined. State of Our World Report Synthesising Whole Systems. Raising Uncomfortable Questions. 50 ideas to change the world | Guardian Sustainable Business.
Change.org - Start, Join, and Win Campaigns for Change. Startups Challenge. Kopernik | Technology Marketplace. Prove My Concept | Practical tools for entrepreneurial students interested in starting their own businesses. Sparked.com Microvolunteering. Skilled Online Volunteering. Postcode Lottery Green Challenge - Nick Christy (Winner): Water Recycling Shower. Top 100 Social Entrepreneurs, Businesses, and Ideas on Twitter.