Building a sustainable, prosperous and fair society.
Our vision is of a vibrant economy brimming with businesses that strive to build a sustainable, prosperous and fair society for everyone. It is of a world buzzing with experienced professionals and practitioners investing back their career capital in people who are starting out as leaders.
Our mission is to help business-minded makers & doers bring their ambitions to life. We work alongside them to make a positive impact for their community, and we support them on their journey toward a purposeful and profitable enterprise.
Our approach is to roll our sleeves up and work together as multi diciplined team. We bring in the right mix of people, resources and practical governance. Together we make things work and innovate intelligently toward brilliant visions of the future to realise good outcomes.
Do you have an ambition to launch and build a business that is driven by purpose and sustained with healthy profits? Do you want to lead a good company that provides your staff with decent livelihoods so that you can serve your customers, users and wider community well?
We provide you with the investment, support, expertise and connections that you need to make that happen. It’s your business and we respect that. We are concerned first with the beneficial impact your business has, and only then about returns on our capital. We are patient and will be there to support you build a sustainable enterprise; not pressure you to scale up quickly or narrow your vision down to your EBITA numbers alone.
Success is when your business is self-reliant, when it is delivering social value, and when it can continue doing that for the long term. You and your colleagues are what matter in making this happen so we are investing in you and your team. We can help you with the cash you need to get started but developing your capability as leaders, makers and doers is what we are all about.
We are a bunch of practitioners with world class expertise that is there to for you to draw on. We are intentional innovators and can help out in a hands-on and practical way to navigate your challenges and build your capabilities. We provide expert advice and mentoring that spans strategy and governance, product engineering, through to pair-programming sessions with your software developers.
What we ask from you is that you strive to:
To start with, you simply need an idea or project that needs support and investment to realise environmental/social benefit that’s broadly aligned with the UN’s SDGs.
We welcome applications from individuals, charities, social enterprises, mission-led businesses and organisations.
Our network of supporters and angel investors are people who are rich in experience and have a wealth of career capital - expertise, skills and other resources - to call on. They have busy lives but also a determination to make a difference by helping others.
Our members are motivated first by making a positive impact and second by maintaining and growing their career capital. These assets include experience, social and professional network, skills, and financial.
Our memebers bring their whole selves to the table and commit their full canopy of resources; their time, energy, know-how, expertise and money. This is proactive but patient capital at work.
Our prime specialism is digital - product engineering, service delivery, strategy and transformation - complimented with expertise in other fields.
We ask our members to invest career capital alongside financial capital.
We partner with companies, foundations, charities, national and international government organisations. Our partners further the innovate-for-good movement through funding, investment, community engagement, expertise and insights.
We support businesses with purpose using our practical and financial capital. Our strength is tech and innovation and we have broad conception of what that means. We believe brilliant outcomes result from the capabilities of dedicated teams of people. For us, success looks like a commercially sustainable company of motivated and capable people serving their users, customers and community.
We want to advance equity, diversity and inclusion in every dimension of what we do and hold ourselves accountable for the results. Working with a businesses run and staffed by people breaking glass ceilings is especially interesting to us.
Big changes result from incremental steps, taken in common purpose, toward a shared vision. Innovation is about novel change, experimental variation, introducing new things into established settings. Innovation is not about appropriating exclusive rights to IP and global scale, although this can be an outcome of technical invention.
Our approach and framework for success rest on our many years of experience delivering tech-enabled innovation.
We offer pro-bono and discounted consultancy services alongside grants, simple loans, and equity based seed and follow up financial capital.
Pro-bono services and grants are available for early and exploratory projects. These are to help you tighten-up your thinking, test out your idea’s impact potential, and validate commercial feasibility.
Ongoing support, loans and equity finance are available for the most promising projects. These are to establish and grow self-sustaining social enterprises.