Acumen Fund helping improve lives through investments
Allison Woodman
Issue date: 12/4/07 Section: Inside Ross
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While Acumen provides ventures with capital, it is changing the development paradigm by focusing also on talent and knowledge. Talent at the local level is recognized by Acumen as one of the greatest impediments to achieving growth and scale in enterprises. Talent of the local management team in terms of experience, motivation, and dedication is the most important of four factors considered in evaluating a venture for acceptance. In 2006, Acumen also started a fellows program where a fellow would get trained in the US for a few months and then be placed in an investee organization for nine months. This not only helped train managers and generate innovative solutions for the local enterprises, but it helped build leaders for the development community as well.
The fund is working with universities as well as other institutions and journals to increase its impact through knowledge sharing and communication. Acumen believes that strategic partnerships with corporations or foundations can help accelerate change, it partnered with Google to develop a web-based portfolio data management system. The system, which stores financial metrics and other qualitative data, has been adopted by several other non-profits including Google.org.
Currently, the Acumen Fund serves a critical role as an intermediary between BoP ventures and charitable donors. But as Trelstad said, "what do you need a middle man for?" The answer is simple. "Either there is a market opportunity…or there is a market failure. In this case, there is a market failure, clearly in capital. There is nobody that has money that is willing to take bets on million dollar investments."
As Acumen focuses on growing to have $100 million in investments by 2011, the question they face is- how do you invest and grow strategically such that you have the biggest impact at the base of the pyramid (BoP)? "When you think about the scope of poverty alleviation, that ($27million currently invested) is still a drop in the bucket," said Professor Ted London. Acumen's new approach to focus not only on capital investment but also on knowledge sharing and talent development could be the direction that the non-profit sector needs to take, in order to solve this significant issue.
For more information on the Acumen Fund, please visit http://www.acumenfund.org.
The fund is working with universities as well as other institutions and journals to increase its impact through knowledge sharing and communication. Acumen believes that strategic partnerships with corporations or foundations can help accelerate change, it partnered with Google to develop a web-based portfolio data management system. The system, which stores financial metrics and other qualitative data, has been adopted by several other non-profits including Google.org.
Currently, the Acumen Fund serves a critical role as an intermediary between BoP ventures and charitable donors. But as Trelstad said, "what do you need a middle man for?" The answer is simple. "Either there is a market opportunity…or there is a market failure. In this case, there is a market failure, clearly in capital. There is nobody that has money that is willing to take bets on million dollar investments."
As Acumen focuses on growing to have $100 million in investments by 2011, the question they face is- how do you invest and grow strategically such that you have the biggest impact at the base of the pyramid (BoP)? "When you think about the scope of poverty alleviation, that ($27million currently invested) is still a drop in the bucket," said Professor Ted London. Acumen's new approach to focus not only on capital investment but also on knowledge sharing and talent development could be the direction that the non-profit sector needs to take, in order to solve this significant issue.
For more information on the Acumen Fund, please visit http://www.acumenfund.org.
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