My First Post on this Blog

Recently, I finished teaching a class at Colorado State University on "Social Entrepreneurship and Sustainable Business Strategies". It was a great group of students, and many of them have now graduated. I learned a lot from these students- together we tried to find examples of what is happening at the frontiers of social entrepreneurship and sustainable business, and I am grateful to them for learning about new organizations and initiatives. I am also grateful to our visitors- Hillary Mizia from New Belgium Brewing, a leader in sustainable business practices (see www.newbelgium.com, or better yet, come to Fort Collins and get a brewery tour), Libby Cook, founder of Wild Oats market, Wally Van Sickle of IdeaWild (www.ideawild.org) and Chet T. from Green Grants (www.greengrants.org). What you guys have done, and continue to do, inspired the class.

It was during this class that "BOPreneur" and "BOPportunity" came into being. Entrepreneurs exploit opportunities. Market needs generally come from unsolved problems. There are some major unsolved problems in the world today: poverty, health, education, environment (www.un.org/millenniumgoals). And they are unsolved after decades of well intentioned development projects . How do you make a significant difference? How do you build a sustainable organization? How do you scale it? That is what BOPreneurship is about.