What comes after innovation? As CEO of Benjamin Franklin Technology Partners, an organization charged with catalyzing the Philadelphia region's entrepreneurial and innovation economy, I've struggled with this question. It was 2001 when I began to follow the emerging national narrative around impact, marked by Harvard Business Review's January 2001 issue: Ideas with Impact - an issue I still have to this day. In it, an article by Charles Handy entitled "Tocqueville Revisited: The Meaning of American Prosperity." revisits Tocqueville's journey, but focuses on capitalism instead of democracy. Handy writes of the need for "new capitalism" and discusses American Nobel Prize Winner Robert Fogel's optimism that "a new sense of purpose…will be at the heart of the next stage of capitalism." The idea resonated with me then and stayed with me over time.
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