Whenever I go to Babson I get a boost of inspiration! Yesterday was the Forum on Entrepreneurship and I got the opportunity to listen to a handful of incredibly inspiring individuals from companies such as Facebook, Deckers, iRobot, and mzinga on what's on their minds as far as how we foster an environment of innovation and entrepreneurship. A hot topic of the day was social entrepreneurship and as you can imagine I was all ears at that panel discussion.  Here are a few of my takeaways from the day.

1)  Define your organizations "Dogma" (or often unspoken established belief). I heard a very compelling argument by Anand Vengurlekar on how organizations with Dogma's centered around fostering innovation often times were the winners in their markets. (duh..) But it was the concept of Dogma that got me going. What is your Dogma?

2)  Social Entrepreneurship is innovative at its core. An organization must be innovative in order to succeed at delivering not only profits but on its social mission as well. Being innovative as a social venture requires the ability to constantly inspire all those we touch. I hope we are inspiring! Thank you Mark Albion (one of the founders of Net Impact) for reminding me of this simple statement. Our organization certainly has its work cut out for us.. so far so good! Thank you all for the support!

3) Patience. Gary Vaynerchuk (hysterical guy) again beat into the audience the virtue of patience. Building an organization of sustainable value does not happen overnight. On that note we are jumping up and down with excitement over our new flip-flops which we will be introducing later this fall!

Enjoy the weekend,
-Dave