social-innovation
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Bhau Institute gives ideas a big brother.
At COEP in Pune, a nonprofit incubator connects inventors with workshops, mentors and funding routes. Its most useful idea is that different problems need different kinds of help.
A startup needs a village. Asan Nanum builds one.
From Seoul classrooms to a house in Silicon Valley, the Asan Nanum Foundation makes a practical bet: more people can build something useful when space, advice, and second chances come together.
Pradeep Kakkattil and the Case for Leaving the Building
He began in journalism and filmmaking in India. Now the HIEx founder connects entrepreneurs, investors and public institutions - and argues that good ideas sometimes need a place of their own.
Paris&Co puts the startup pitch to the street test
A clever idea can survive a pitch and still lose an argument with a gym timetable. Paris&Co helps entrepreneurs and public institutions discover the difference before they commit to a rollout.
Impact Hub Bucharest learned what 70 memberships couldn't buy
Seventy people paid before the doors opened. The harder business was giving them a reason to return - a lesson that shaped a Romanian workspace, education platform and startup accelerator.
Ship2B Foundation makes good intentions investable
A social project can change lives and still struggle to pay its bills. Barcelona’s Ship2B Foundation works in that awkward gap, pairing patient money with the discipline to make a useful idea last.
Rethink Ireland’s big bet: good causes need good operations
Cash gets a social project started. Rethink Ireland adds the planning, people and practical support that help it grow - with government and private donors sharing the bill.
SIA wants Pakistan’s good ideas to become working businesses
From olive-oil marketing in Balochistan to startup grants and a women-led enterprise summit, Social Innovation Academy is working on the unglamorous parts of social change: skills, customers and connections.
DGA turns public funding into a working proposition
From factory pilots to life after coal, the Polish consultancy organizes the work between an ambitious idea and a useful result. Its accounts reveal why managing millions is a different business from earning them.
CcHUB Is Building the Parts a Startup Cannot Download
The Lagos-born innovation company has spent years assembling the people, capital and institutional connections behind African tech ventures. Its most useful lesson: a promising app still needs somewhere to go.
District 3 Takes No Equity. Bring Your Time.
At Concordia’s startup incubator, founders keep their shares and face some awkward questions. The real investment is learning what customers will actually pay for.
The Brussels Think Tank Building an Economy From the Ground Up
Club of Brussels is trying to turn regenerative economics from a conference-room idea into a working local system - training founders, connecting projects and testing the plumbing of a new marketplace.
Hitachi
The 1910 mining-repair shop that quietly became the backbone of the world's power grids and railways is now betting its next century on AI you can touch.
Noora Health
Noora Health is a nonprofit that treats families as an untapped part of the care team. By training patients' relatives with practical, condition-specific health skills while they wait in hospital wards - then reinforcing that training after discharge through WhatsApp, voice calls, and live chat - its Care Companion Program has reached tens of millions of caregivers across India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Nepal, cutting newborn readmissions and post-surgical cardiac complications.
Jaspal Sandhu
Jaspal Sandhu is a designer, educator, and social entrepreneur who became President and CEO of Hopelab, a social innovation lab and impact investor focused on the mental well-being of young people ages 10 to 25, on January 1, 2026. Trained as an engineer at MIT and as a designer at UC Berkeley, he built his career around human-centered design in global health, co-founding the pioneering social impact design firm Gobee Group and teaching public health innovation at Berkeley since 2010. At Hopelab he has led investments in youth-focused mental health startups, raised millions for youth-led technology work, and built research and fellowship programs centered on Black, Brown, and Queer young people.
Edith Elliott
Edith Elliott is the co-founder and co-CEO of Noora Health, a global nonprofit that turns hospital waiting rooms into classrooms and trains family members to care for their loved ones after discharge. What started as a Stanford design class project at a Bangalore hospital in 2012 has grown into an organization that has trained more than a million family caregivers across India, Bangladesh, Nepal and Indonesia. A TED speaker, Audacious Project winner and Skoll awardee, Elliott has built her career at the intersection of research, policy and design, betting that the most overlooked resource in any health system is the people already sitting at the bedside.
Jim Garrison
Jim Garrison is the Founder and President of Ubiquity University, a next-generation global learning platform blending academic rigor with consciousness development, social innovation, and transformative education. Born in 1951 in Szechuan Province, China, to Baptist missionary parents, Garrison holds a PhD in Philosophical Theology from Cambridge and has spent five decades at the intersection of education, diplomacy, and civilizational transformation - co-founding the Gorbachev Foundation/USA with Mikhail Gorbachev after the Cold War, launching the State of the World Forum, and more recently convening Humanity Rising, a global summit initiative launched in 2020 that has engaged hundreds of thousands of activists worldwide.
Ajay Prakash
Ajay Prakash is the Co-Founder and CEO of Rinse, a tech-enabled clothing care company that has raised over $70 million and operates pickup-and-delivery laundry services across major U.S. cities. A Stanford GSB MBA alum (Class of 2010), he returned to his alma mater as a Lecturer in Management, teaching Startup Garage: Design — an intensive course where student teams build and test real-world business concepts. Before Rinse, Prakash worked at Bain & Company, Berkshire Partners, and briefly interned with Bonobos (where he became an early angel investor). He holds a BA in Economics with High Honors from Dartmouth College and has been featured on NPR's 'How I Built This' with Guy Raz.
Claire Diaz-Ortiz
Claire Diaz-Ortiz is a venture capitalist, angel investor, bestselling author of 10 books, executive coach, and former Twitter Corporate Social Innovation Director - the early employee Wired dubbed 'The Woman Who Got the Pope on Twitter.' A Stanford and Oxford-educated polymath who co-founded a nonprofit in Kenya, live-tweeted the birth of her child, holds the prized @claire Twitter handle, and now runs The Angel Collective to fund female founders across Latin America while coaching Fortune 500 executives through 100 Coaches Agency.
Gwendolyn Carpenter
Gwendolyn Carpenter is the Head of Artificial Intelligence Division at the European Investment Bank (EIB), where she defines and executes the Group's AI strategy, builds its enterprise AI platform, and leads EU AI Act compliance efforts. A veteran European policy practitioner, she has shaped digital innovation agendas across smart cities, social innovation research, and cybercrime policy - most recently turning her expertise toward the frontier challenge of governing AI inside one of the world's largest development finance institutions.