About The S.E.VEN Fund

QuickLinks:
• Ending Global Poverty Is Serious Business
• What S.E.VEN Stands For
• Team Biographies
• Our Mission
• Our Goals
• Company Structure
• Funding
• Common Questions About S.E.VEN

Ending Global Poverty Is Serious Business

S.E.VEN (Social Equity Venture Fund) is a virtual non-profit entity run by
entrepreneurs whose strategy is to markedly increase the rate of diffusion of
enterprise-based solutions to poverty. We do this by targeted investment that
fosters thought leadership through books, films and websites; supporting role
models - whether they are entrepreneurs or innovative firms - in developing nations;
and shaping a new discourse in government, the press and the academy around private-sector innovation, prosperity and progressive human values.

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What S.E.VEN Stands For

S.E.VEN Fund stands for Social Equity Venture Fund. But the name is also inspired by Michael Fairbanks Framework of the "Seven Forms of Capital."

The number seven also has significant meanings in various cultures around the world.

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Team Biographies

Michael Fairbanks
Michael Fairbanks is a Co-Founder of SEVEN, a philanthropic foundation run by entrepreneurs, whose strategy is to produce films, books and original research to markedly increase the rate of diffusion of enterprise solutions to global poverty.

He is the founder and Chairman Emeritus of the OTF Group, a strategy-consulting firm based in Boston, and the first venture-backed U.S. firm to focus on developing nations. He was a U.S. Peace Corps teacher in Kenya, and a Wall Street banker. A long-time angel investor, he is a founding shareholder in Merrimack Pharmaceuticals, which has drugs currently undergoing FDA trials to fight cancer and autoimmune diseases.

His most recent projects include advising the President of the Inter-American Development Bank on its Opportunities for the Majority Initiative; working for the President of Rwanda to improve the competitiveness of that nation's tourism, coffee and agro-industry sectors; and advising the Minister of Finance of Afghanistan on private-sector reforms. He conceived and oversees the Global Pioneers of Prosperity Program, in cooperation with OTF, Legatum, the Multilateral Investment Fund, and the Templeton Foundation, which finds and recognizes role model businesses in the world’s poorest nations. He is producing the film, "Sparks Rising, Stories of Redemption from Rwanda," by Academy Award short-listed director, Deborah Scranton.

He co-authored Harvard Business School's landmark book on business strategy in emerging markets, "Plowing the Sea, Nurturing the Hidden Sources of Advantage in Developing Nations," with a foreword by Michael Porter. Business Week Magazine said, "Plowing the Sea points the way toward creating prosperity in developing nations;" the Boston Globe named it one of the ten best books of the year in Politics and Economics; and Exame magazine, Brazil’s leading business weekly, called it one of the ten best books of the decade.

He co-conceived and contributed to the global best selling book "Culture Matters: How Values Shape Human Progress," edited by Sam Huntington and Larry Harrison at Harvard. His next book, edited with Malik Fal and Marcela Escobari-Rose, contains essays by OTF colleagues and clients from around the world. It is entitled "The Poor Are Awake" and is due out in the spring of 2009.

His work has been translated into a dozen languages, including Korean, Mongolian and Serbian. He was a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, a lecturer at Harvard, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts. He studied philosophy and biochemistry at the University of Scranton, a Jesuit university in Pennsylvania where he was a trustee for six years, and African politics at Columbia University in New York City.

He was appointed to the Commission on Globalization with, among others, Mikhail Gorbachev, Jane Goodall and Joe Stiglitz. In 2007, he was appointed to the President’s Advisory Council in Rwanda with Pastor Rick Warren, and President Donald Kaberuka of the African Development Bank. In 2006, his alma mater gave him its highest award, a doctorate in humane letters for his "accomplishments and devotion to social justice."

Andreas Widmer
The co-director of the S.E.VEN Fund, Andreas Widmer was previously an executive in residence at Highland Capital Partners, a leading venture capital firm. A seasoned business executive, Widmer has led such international strategy consulting and high technology software firms as the OTF Group, Eprise Corporation, Dragon Systems and FTP Software. He has worked extensively in the United States, Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America and has brought more than100 leading-edge technology products to market.

During his 17-year career, he has furthered the buildup of four startup companies with cumulative exits valued at more than $730 million. Widmer’s current projects include advising several medical device and high-technology startup companies on strategy, venture capital and angel fund-raising efforts.

He serves on the board of directors/advisors of the OTF Group, Virtual Research Associates, Twin Star Medical, Smart Destinations, Island Desserts, Legatus Boston, the World Youth Alliance and the Boston Catholic Men’s Conference.

Widmer served as a Pontifical Swiss Guard from 1986-1988, protecting Pope John Paul II. He speaks fluent German, Italian and French and has a basic knowledge of Spanish.

Elizabeth Hooper
Elizabeth Hooper is Executive Director at the Social Equity Venture Fund, where she works closely with the Fund's founders on key initiatives. Prior to joining SEVEN, Hooper was Manager of Operations for six years at the OTF Group, an international development and management consulting firm. She advised the executive team on issues related to human capital management, marketing, and field operations. She also managed the firm's internal market research practice and actively consulted on key client engagements in Africa, Eastern Europe, Latin America and the Caribbean, and the Middle East. She holds degrees in Anthropology and Communications from the University of Massachusetts, and is currently completing her Masters in Anthropology at Harvard. She also serves on the Board of Directors for local non-profit organizations.

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Our Mission

To catalyze, support and disseminate research on questions of economic development,
prosperity and entrepreneurship, particularly new frontiers related to enterprise-based solutions to poverty and innovative ideas unlikely to be supported by conventional funding sources.

Our approach is nontraditional, posing a challenge to the classic pattern of funding top-down projects with government-led conceptual frameworks. We support the uncertain and often interdisciplinary methods required to develop and encourage truly entrepreneurial approaches to wealth creation and poverty reduction.

In addition, S.E.VEN strives to reignite the excitement and meaning of entrepreneurship in the public consciousness so that outdated thinking no longer curtails the potential for massive poverty reduction.

The S.E.VEN Fund encourages rigorous and innovative researchers to tackle questions head-on, unlocking the potential of enterprise-based solutions to poverty.

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Our Goals

• To expand the purview of scientific inquiry to include scientific disciplines fundamental to a deep understanding of entrepreneurship and economic development, but which are currently largely unsupported by conventional grant sources.
• To forge and maintain useful collaborations between researchers and on-the-ground actors working on Enterprise Based Solutions to Poverty.
• To provide the public with a deeper understanding in this area, and their potential implications for our worldview.
• To create a logistically, intellectually, and financially self-sustaining independent organization to accomplish these goals during and beyond the initial three year program beginning in 2007, thereby pioneering a new model of philanthropically and government grant-funded efforts in enterprise based solutions to poverty.

S.E.VEN funding is aimed at supporting research that is both foundational (with potentially significant and broad implications for our understanding of how entrepreneurs lift people out of poverty) and unconventional (enabling research that, because of its speculative, non-mainstream or high-risk nature, would otherwise go unperformed due to lack of funding).

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Company Structure

S.E.VEN is an independent nonprofit organization that provides monetary, organizational and intellectual support for the study of enterprise-based solutions to poverty, in accord with the S.E.VEN Fund Charter. The S.E.VEN Board provides the leadership, and a variety of qualified jurors make funding decisions.

The fund's activities are enhanced by the active participation of its. S.E.VEN Fund membership consists of all researchers funded by the organization, as well as researchers with membership granted by the S.E.VEN principals by invitation only.

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Funding

Building on a generous seed grant from the John Templeton Foundation, the fund seeks to expand its support structure to include other donors with a vision consistent with that of S.E.VEN.

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Common Questions About S.E.VEN

What is the SEVEN Fund?
Michael Fairbanks and Andreas Widmer started S.E.VEN, a small, virtual, nonprofit entity whose strategy is to markedly increase the rate of diffusion of enterprise-based solutions to poverty. They do this by targeting investment that fosters thought leadership through books, films and websites; supporting role models—whether they are entrepreneurs or innovative firms—in developing nations; and shaping a new discourse in government, the press and the academy around private-sector innovation, prosperity and progressive human values.

Fairbanks and Widmer are a proven team in the field of enterprise-based solutions to poverty with strong connections to entrepreneurs, the private sector, financial institutions, governments, academia and nongovernmental organizations. These relationships are the keys to S.E.VEN. Both men are experts in the field as well as entrepreneurs themselves. Both have built up several companies successfully.

The operations of the organization are based on a “pledge fund” concept, existing at the center of a nexus of great organizations and private and public sector leaders, and characterized by narrow scope of functions, low overhead, nimble decision making, shared decision rights by the principals, measurable results and rational risk taking.

The assets of the institution are not the infrastructure, scale and massive infusions of capital, but rather the networks of leaders, pattern recognition in business strategy and economics, tolerance for ambiguity in uncertain environments, contrarian temperament and a long-term perspective.

   • More About Andreas Widmer
   • More About Michael Fairbanks
   • More About Elizabeth Hooper

What is S.E.VEN’s strategy?
The private sector generates more employment and prosperity than all governments and multilateral institutions combined. Still, it receives little attention as a vehicle for economic and social transformation. There are whole centers of economic development (i.e. at Harvard and Columbia universities and the Center for Global Development) that pay no attention to firm-level innovations in developing nations.

The reasons are numerous: the development paradigm is forged by a priestly caste of economists, trained in linear thinking and a narrow set of quantitative methodologies (regressions, multi-factor analyses, etc.), who are overly beholden to their intellectual forebearers. The resulting top-down policy incentives, enacted by a narrow set of “decision-making units” (ie. head of government, minister of finance), are often painful to the majority of citizens. At the same time, private sector innovators are often thrust into the shadows, defined as greedy and narrowly self-interested. Government leaders assume a parental role toward the poorest in society, and the private sector is marginalized as a potential force for good.

S.E.VEN’s strategy is, bluntly, to do the opposite—encouraging private-sector innovations that come from the bottom up, are cognitive in nature and take some time. In this model there is no “decision-making unit,” per se, to determine the trajectory. The logic of markets, informed by evidence, examples, role models and the diffusion of innovative thinking (RE: Everett Rogers) take precedence. S.E.VEN’s role is to accelerate this process, inform it and increase what we learn—even if that’s by speeding up failure.

The overarching approach that S.E.VEN uses is the heuristic of “Seven Forms of Capital” (RE: Culture Matters, Chapter 20). There are forms of capital that are easy to see and measure. These include Natural Capital, Man-Made Capital and Financial Capital. These three are, overwhelmingly, the focus of the major development banks and institutions.

Four other forms of capital, which are more difficult to see and measure, are perhaps even more important to the development of a region and its people. These are Institutional Capital (i.e. rule of law, democracy), Knowledge Capital (R&D, international patents), Human Capital (skills and capabilities) and Cultural Capital (pro-innovation thinking; RE: Harrison).

S.E.VEN’s mission is to foster a discussion, spur innovation and invest in these four higher forms of capital and their linkages with improved standard of living and progressive human values (i.e. interpersonal trust, tolerance for those unlike ourselves, a future orientation, self-discipline, rational risk taking, etc.).

This strategy will include:

1. Finding inspirational examples of companies in the world’s most difficult environments that meet four criteria simultaneously: they create products with traits for sophisticated and demanding consumers; they create exceptional shareholder returns; they provide high and rising wages and training for employees; and they do not degrade the environment for future generations.
2. Supporting the innovations (books, articles, films, conferences and websites) of the world’s next generation of thought leaders (i.e. academics, consultants, public sector leaders, documentarians), especially those who are nationals of developing nations, reside in those nations, are in nontraditional domains (i.e. anthropology, sociology, business strategy, childhood education, digital and life sciences), and those who choose to work across disciplines on the challenges and linkages between prosperity and progressive human values.

Consider the following examples from around the world:

• The money that the immigrant community in the United States sends back to Mexico and the rest of Latin America dwarfs the global total of foreign aid and direct foreign investment to all poor nations. Most of this money is consumed, not invested into enterprises back in the villages and small towns. These funds could foster innovation and long-term prosperity for remote communities.
• The smallest nations of the Caribbean are overwhelmingly dependent on access to European markets and subsidies, especially in the sugar industry. These benefits are disappearing, and no alternatives are on the horizon. This change has consequences for the entire hemisphere. Can entrepreneurs who are properly stimulated and rewarded find ways to build complex strategic advantages on top of the region’s natural resources?
• Africa is enjoying a boom in selling natural resources to China, and many are convinced that the region has turned the corner. Still, wages remain low, commodity markets are fickle, the environment is being destroyed, and no real sustainable advantages are in sight.
• Most foreign advisors tell entrepreneurs in Afghanistan to find ways to sell things to Europe and America. The truth is that their biggest markets, traditional relationships and largest opportunities lie in Pakistan and India. Globalization makes it possible for poor economies sell to one another, but policies and formal advice do not encourage this behavior.

These are four regions of the world, just four examples, where current research is lacking, where there are few role models, and where the white hot light of academic attention, media coverage and policy innovation do not adequately illuminate the facts.

We imagine a world where a documentary film directed by an Academy Award–nominated director depicts successful reinvestment of remittances into a small community business in Southern Mexico; where young, world-class academics from the West Indies and Korea collaborate on a book about past social and economic investment strategies in East Asia that pertain to the current challenges of small Caribbean nations; where we create an investment index in Africa to allow sophisticated investors to begin to see Africa not as a monolithic continent of uncertainty, but as a region of nations with subtleties and differences and high quality opportunities; and where we create a conference in Kabul for entrepreneurs to reopen ancient trade routes and relationships to India, one of the world’s fastest growing markets.

Success at S.E.VEN is determined by a series of primary and secondary metrics—published branded works, conference attendance, media coverage, website hits—but it is important to note that the very nature of this kind of change is difficult to measure. That is why few focus on it, why philanthropy, with its long-term perspective and contrarian temperament, is well-placed to achieve it, and why S.E.VEN’s strategy is to be at the nexus of this movement.

How is SEVEN financed?
S.E.VEN has been seed-funded by a generous grant from the John Templeton Foundation. Other donors include Legatum Capital and the Inter-American Development Bank.
 
What sort of legal organization is SEVEN?
S.E.VEN is a 501(c)(3) not-for profit charitable organization, incroprorated in Massachusetts, USA.

What is the scope of and impetus of S.E.VEN’s competitions?
S.E.VEN’s competitive projects seek answers to some of the “big questions”:

1. What are the most significant qualities of a successful entrepreneur (in a developing economy)?
2. Can entrepreneurship be taught, inspired and diffused through a society?
3. Perhaps most critically, can support for the entrepreneurial spirit serve as a harbinger of sustainable solutions to poverty?

Our work will also touch on other fields, concepts and realities: creativity, curiosity, emergence, entrepreneurship, future-mindedness, generosity, gratitude, honesty, humility, human flourishing, progress, purpose, reliability, self-control, spiritual capital, thrift and wisdom. Indeed, our long-stated view is that these are features of cultural capital that are requisite to innovation, prosperity and a strong society.