Abundance: The Future is Better Than You Think

by Peter H. Diamandis

Backing social entrepreneurs is only one example of the new direction taken by today’s technophilanthropists. Investing in triple-bottom-line companies, as the Rockefeller-backed Acumen Fund does, is another. Acumen is an entirely for-profit company, but it makes those profits investing in businesses that manufacture goods and services urgently needed in the developing world—reading glasses, hearing aids, mosquito nets—and selling them at very affordable prices. Then there’s eBay founder Pierre omidyar’s omidyar Network, an organization that makes for-profit investments to pursue its mission of “individual self-improvement” in key areas such as microfinance, transparency, and—of course—social entrepreneur-ship. “If they [the technophilanthropists] can use their donations to create a profitable solution to a social problem,” writes Economist New York bureau chief Matthew Bishop in his book Philanthrocapitalism: How the Rich Can Save the World (coauthored with Michael Green), “it will attract more capital, far faster, and thus have a far bigger impact, far sooner, than would a solution based entirely on giving the money away.” In choosing to blur the border between nonprofit and for-profit, they are also attempting to redefine charity. “The new philanthropists,” continues Bishop, “believe they are improving philanthropy, equipping it to tackle the new set of problems facing today’s changing world; and to be blunt, it needs improvement—much philanthropy over the centuries has...