Author: Crystal Lo

As my three months in the Netherlands is completed, I have reflected on my experience in connecting with over 150 social entrepreneurs and 50 pipeline partners. Mapping the social entrepreneur space in a foreign country from scratch creates a great sense of fulfillment and I would like to share some of the key highlights I [...]

Recently, I have visited two very different places: one celebrating the old and another embracing the new in applications of harnessing renewable energy. Wind Power:  an age old tradition Windmills have been in The Netherlands for hundreds of years and are a hallmark of Dutch ingenuity in harnessing natural energy to drain out excess water [...]

In my time in The Netherlands, I have already seen a number of examples of how different ventures or groups organize co-creation events to pose key questions to their community to physically come together and create solutions as a group.  This usually comes in the early development stages of a [...]

In my third post on social entrepreneurship in a developed country, I mentioned that there is already an extensive infrastructure in place to support general entrepreneurship in The Netherlands.  This is not too surprising given that The Netherlands was ranked as the most entrepreneurial country in Europe in 2011 according to The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor [...]

An interesting phenomenon and testimony to the growth of the entrepreneurial sector in the Netherlands is an increasing number of Dutch startups that are creating services for other startups.  These include fundraising, valuation and social measurement services introduced below. Symbid – A crowdfunding platform An alternative way for startups to gain investments from the traditional [...]

I have previously alluded to the differences in sectors unique to a developed country as I begin to map the impact space in the Netherlands.  In this blog post, I will share some of the social enterprises I have come across with impact both within the Netherlands and beyond the Netherlands. Impact in the Netherlands [...]

The Impact Space in a Developed Country As one of the few Frontier Market Scouts who is currently in a developed country, I was curious about the differences in the impact space and the types of social enterprises in a developed versus a developing country.  JP Morgan and Global Impact Investor Network conducted an Impact [...]

Starting World Changing Companies Village Capital has two local partners in the Netherlands: Enviu and Kirkman Company.  I have been in the Netherlands for one week and working at Enviu’s office in Rotterdam.  Enviu starts world changing companies aimed to solve social and ecological issues under three core areas:  business development, building impact-driven communities and [...]

The Challenge Today – Who is Doing What? When we look at how critical problems in our world are being addressed today, it is clear that priority issues affecting humanity are not being solved as quickly or effectively as we would hope.  There is no shortage of challenges to tackle: education, gender equality, energy access, [...]