One of the Trico Charitable Foundation's many programs is the Social EnterPrize. This program awards funding and education to Canadian leaders and non-profit organizations that are effectively using social enterprise to deepen their community impact and using innovation to benefit society. Up to four awards can be granted to organizations and individuals. Announced recently at the Enterprising Spirit: Creating Value and Social Good Conference, here are the 2011 winners of the Social EnterPrize.

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Since I have the privilege of working daily in the SiG@MaRS advisory practice with clients who are social entrepreneurs, it’s exciting for me to join a team of pitch doctors to advise participants in the Good Deals: Pitch Clinic, which takes place at the Social Finance Forum on December 14th.

Being a social entrepreneur and trying to find the sweet spot between profit and social benefit is hard. On the one hand, you are consumed by the passion that drives the social mission, but you also need to have the business essentials: both the resources and a robust business model that outlines how to drive revenue growth from selling your product or service.

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Social finance largely concerns itself with finding capital for social enterprise - the supply side. However, the demand side of the equation – in the form of demand for goods and services produced by various social enterprises – is equally important. A major challenge for social enterprises is to figure out how to bolster interest in and purchase of their products.

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Part I of this blog post introduced the Bio.Diaspora technology, which tracks the spread of infectious diseases using international flight data and is transitioning from a grant-funded model to an earned-revenue model. As a business with inherent positive social impact, it may qualify for impact investments as well. However, it is still early days; this post explains how MaRS Innovation is helping maximize the potential of this project.

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A few days from now on Halloween – possibly as you are handing out candy to young trick-or-treaters – the number of people on earth will surpass seven billion. And as the world’s population rises, our global village becomes smaller and smaller. Today, more than two billion travelers board commercial flights every year, making the world both highly interconnected and highly interdependent. And this is not just referring to the global interdependence of financial markets, but rather, global interdependence around the threat of dangerous infectious diseases.

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