Coffee Talk “Light” #2

Coffee Talk – Light

Pittsburgh Social Venture Partners

July 15, 2008

Our Guests:  Hideyuki Inoue, Founder SVP Tokyo and Yuki Okuda research at Keio University

We were extremely fortunate to receive a visit from Hide Inoue, the founder of Social Venture Partners Tokyo.  Hide and his colleague Yuki Okuda are crossing the US doing research on Entrepreneurship and Social Entrepreneurship (think David Bornstein and Gramman Bank).  We were also pleased to have with us Wendy Bennett, executive director of Japan-American Society of PA and Wendy’s colleague Kazuko Macher.  Andy Ai joined us and Andy works for PNC and has been leading several significant regional initiatives, the most high profile is probably the annual Silkscreen Festival.  Interesting PSVP/Japan connections that we didn’t know about:  Bethany Davidson taught English in Tokyo for 4 years and is a member of the Japan-American Society.  Erin Queen has worked in Japan and Southeast Asia for many years before getting married and having children.

We began the discussion with trying to learn about the most pressing social issues in Japan.  Hide said that there’s almost an epidemic among young professional that they lose their personal goals when they go to work because there’s not time left for anything else.  He related his experience with Anderson Consulting — he’d travel into the city, work a minimum of a 12 hour day and take a cab home because no trains ran that late.  There was nothing else and young people want more.  They know that employment isn’t guaranteed – much as the employment picture has changed in the US. 

In 1998 a law was past that established nonprofit status.  Before that, a lot of work got done, it was just done at a grass roots level.  There’s been a big shift among younger generation to care more about society. 

SVP Tokyo grew out of Hide’s work finding sustainable education for young social entrepreneurs — connecting potential social investors who may act as judges/mentors for a business plan competition.  In Japan, there are not so many private foundations; however there are quite a lot of high net worth individuals who do make personal donations/contributions.  Before WWII private philanthropists were socially minded.  After WWII, the government took care of social needs.  The SVP Tokyo group started with a small core of people, and they hosted monthly networking meetings that featured a speaker, typically on social enterprise and then networking and looking for ways to match up investors with young business entrepreneurs.  This developed into an ecosystem of social entrepreneurs and supporters. 

SVP Tokyo started in 2003.  They made their first investment in 2005.  They have 72 partners, each donating $1,000 per year.  They have 5 Investees, they expect to bring on 3 new ones this year and they’ve graduated 2 Investees so far.  They have more female partners than male partners, and large corporations are well represented. 

John Denny asked us to think about a way to partner between Pittsburgh and Tokyo and use the support of the Japan-America Society.  We’d focus around a common social problem, and see how we might get some sort of competition going between nonprofits in our two cities – in the vein of changemakers.net.