Dear CWB Friends,

In our December issue, you will find news about CWB, including open vacancies (CWB is growing!) and current project updates. Additionally, we have included a profile of Marc Benioff and a review of InnoCentive, an Internet innovation market. Finally, do remember to check out our Essential Monthly Readings! The CWB staff would like to wish you all a merry Christmas and a very happy New Year!

For questions or concerns regarding this newsletter, please write to mbueno@ceoswb.org.

Enjoy the reading! 

CWB NEWS

Leveraging: CEOs Without Borders is expanding its activities to support business people and companies leading their own projects designed to improve the business environment and promote entrepreneurship in developing countries.  We offer support in the form of expertise and networking. During the last few months, we have worked with Sara-Lee on the Malaki project.  We are working on the development of an invention that would allow developing countries to freeze ready-to-eat fruit pieces for export to Europe and the USA. Also, we are collaborating with the private sector in Ghana on the development of an affordable and commercially viable mosquito repellent system.  More information will be coming soon on our website.   

Website updates:  In the Support material section, read inspiring stories about business in Africa, from small-scale businesses flourishing through mobile access to large movie productions created for northern markets.

Support CWB

CWB is looking for a Senior Manager to assist with program outreach and fundraising.  Contact us for further details.

CWB is seeking writers to increase the number of staff writers contributing to our website, newsletter and upcoming blog. English proficiency required.

Internship - French: Assistant to expand cooperation projects in Senegal. French proficiency required.  Commitment: four hours a week.

CWB is seeking mentors for:

• Health care system development in Ghana: Proper medical assistance is difficult to get in Ghana, and must be paid for in cash.  Mrs. Tuakli wants to create an insurance system for local clients.  She believes this development will allow her to attend to her clients whenever needed, and also contribute to expanding the business.  Mrs. Tuakli is seeking advice in planning this insurance system, as well as an expansion strategy.

• Travel agency contacts & investment project in Ghana: Kwame Ansong wishes to develop contacts with travel agencies in Europe to expand the network of his travel agency, www.sunseekerstours.com.  He also hopes to establish contacts with potential investors in the construction of a Novotel in Ghana.

• Hotel Management: Lankesha Ponnamperuma is manager at the Coconut Beach Resort in Ghana. He is seeking support to jump from micro to macro management.  

Profile of the month: Marc Benioff

At 42, Marc Benioff is chairman and chief executive officer of Salesforce.com Inc., a leading CRM company he created in March 1999 after working for Oracle. Founded in a San Francisco, his company provided one of the early examples of the sale of software as a service, a practice known as software “on demand”. The business model of on-demand software is different from traditional business models because the customer does not pay to own the software, but rather to use it.  Salesforce’s innovation was its method of offering its software online and operating applications demanded by customers over the Internet. This system eases the process of software updating by allowing customers to access their software and data from any computer with Internet access and purchase software tailored to their needs.

Benioff has also been committed to using information technology to produce positive social change. He has published three books “Compassionate Capitalism” (2004), “The Business of Changing the World” (2006) and “ My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley” (2007). In his first two books, he advocated a new corporate advocacy exemplified by the Salesforce Foundation launched on 2000.

Salesforce Foundation is the philanthropic arm of Salesforce. It channels 1% of its employee time into volunteering, 1% of its equity into grants and 1% of its products intp CRM donations to NGOs. Benioff believes that Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) should be inextricably linked to the core of business, and that employees should be involved in the philanthropic activities of the company. As he puts it, companies spend a lot of time picking the smartest people to work for them. Therefore, the most valuable contribution they could make would be to dedicate the resource of these people’s time to philanthropic work. This 1-1-1 model (or 1% model) was subsequently copied by Google, the difference being that Google’s Foundation manages $1 billion in assets, while Salesforce’s are only $30 million. 

Link of the month: Innocentive

Innocentive.com was founded in 2001 based on a model imagined by drug maker Eli Lilly. Its concept was very simple: to create an innovation marketplace in which firms or people in need of help (‘Seekers’) would be able to find experts (‘Solvers’) with the time, resources and expertise to solve their problems (‘Challenges’).  In general, these problems offer no easy solutions. Some prizes for successful Seekers are as high as $1 million, but most are less than $100,000. More than 50 challenges are now pending.

Innocentive makes use of the extraordinary networking possibilities of the Internet through what has been called cloud clout or crowdsourcing. This idea, pioneered by letsbuyit.com and Mercata, is not a new one.  Both failed, some people say, because they came too early – though letsbuyit.com will stage a comeback soon. One of the major differences between Innocentive and these earlier sites is that it deals not with Consumer Business Industries, but with ideas.  Hence, transactions are less common.  Also, let’s not forget there are now one billion people online.

Innocentive seekers and solvers are anonymous. "An undergrad from the University of Dallas solved a problem for a Fortune 500 company," says Ms. Panetta, Innocentive’s chief scientific officer. She sees this anonymity as an advantage: "They are really judging it on the sciences, not on who is standing behind it."

Although the categories encompass both arts and sciences, most of the Challenges seem to belong in the sciences arena. One surprise has been that the farther a problem has been from a solver's expertise, the more likely it has been that he or she was able to solve it. It turns out that outsiders look through a completely different lens.

This model is not exclusive to standard business participants. NGOs are starting to take advantage of Innocentive as a place to find solutions for consumers in developing countries, solutions that the market would not develop on its own. Just recently, the Rockefeller Foundation posted a challenge to design a solar-powered wireless router composed of low-cost, readily available hardware and software components. The router is to become part of a reliable Internet communication network connecting metropolises and remote towns in developing countries.

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