Mario Morino is co-founder and chairman of Venture Philanthropy Partners, a philanthropic investment organization committed to children of low-income families in the Washington, DC region. He is also the chairman of the Morino Institute, a non-profit organization that explores opportunities to leverage technology to advance social change.
In the early 1990s, a seasoned executive shared a metaphor that has stayed with me ever since: he said that innovation is like a coral reef. Marine biologists don’t fully understand what causes reefs to form, he said, but we do know that human actions can nurture or harm the process. The same is true for innovation—a natural, chaotic, unpredictable process that is hard, perhaps even impossible, for well-meaning outsiders to foster.
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The Stanford Social Innovation Review is written for and by social change leaders in the nonprofit, business, and government sectors. Sample articles of particular interest to readers of What Matters are available below.
- Revitalizing Struggling Cities
by Ben Hecht. Living Cities is working with five US municipalities to develop an ecosystem for solving urban problems.
- Picking Green Tech's Winners and Losers
by Clayton M. Christensen, Shuman Talukdar, Richard Alton, and Michael B. Horn. Unless clean tech follows well-established rules of innovation and commercialization, the industry’s promise to provide sustainable sources of energy will fail.
- McKinsey Quarterly : Social Innovators are using prizes to spur solutions to difficult societal problems
- Center for American Progress: Can social impact accelerate social innovation?
- Bloomberg BusinessWeek: America’s most promising social entrepreneurs
- The New York Times: Venture philanthropy and the foreign aid revolution.
- Wired magazine: Massive biometric project gives millions of Indians an ID
08 Jan 2012 · 04:50:11 PM GMT
Dr. Parekh, We would be happy to collaborate with you and your organizations to share your stories of progress. I think you will also find other examples of affordable, quality health care programs in ViewChange.—Wendy Hanamura
In response to Telling the world’s stories to promote change
23 Dec 2011 · 03:48:12 AM GMT
Agree. Data Analytics has been left as only a commercial corporate concept for a long time; with Governments only relying on a 5-yearly census to get key statistics.Social data as it is generated from social media is a powerful Risk Management and So...—Mthandeni Mathabela
In response to Harnessing big data to address the world’s problems
21 Dec 2011 · 03:56:38 PM GMT
Gary and Matt, When I was a child in India in the 1950s, there was a question that was continuously being asked by those in government, universities, private industry and public-sector organizations: “How do we feed all our people, when we ...—Ajay Bhatla
In response to Dare to be orthogonal
19 Dec 2011 · 01:44:09 PM GMT
Love your site and especially your name! Thanks for the awesome concept and great articles. I couldn’t find a share button to push it to Facebook or other sites aside from Twitter.—Bryan Thomas