Bethnal Green Ventures is an accelerator programme for people who want to use technology to change stuff that really matters: from health care and education to employment and energy creation.

We support great people with new ideas to help build solutions to social problems through an intensive three-month programme: taking an idea from back-of-the-envelope to social startup.

It’s a new way of supporting people to grow sustainable and scalable social innovations.

Why?

We think there’s huge potential for the online world to radically improve things that really matter in the offline world: from how we provide health and social care to designing new forms of education, energy creation and employment.

These ideas don’t come from traditional companies, governments or charities. They start with smart, passionate, practical people.

And they can’t be created within old organisations either. They’re social startups: new organisational forms that blur the boundaries between public, private and social.

Bethnal Green Ventures seeks out tough problems and great people and matches them with the support they need to grow sustainable, scalable social innovations.

How?

Bethnal Green Ventures seeks out people with great ideas: they might be software developers, designers or people with personal experience of something they want to change – from teachers and doctors, to patients and carers. We look for very early-stage ideas – not business plans – and we’re more interested in potential than experience.

We select teams of between two and four people to be part of the Bethnal Green Ventures programme. Each team will get to spend three months with us building their idea. We provide a community of support and advice to help build, test and launch each startup.

Our aim is to not only to launch a set of new ventures, but to build an alumni community that will go on to create and run even more social startups in the future.

We ran the first test-run of the Bethnal Green Ventures programme in autumn 2010 and look forward to running a new and improved in 2012.

Who’s behind BGV?

In 2008, we founded Social Innovation Camp. You can find out more about who we are here.

Social Innovation Camp brings together software developers and designers with people who have a social problem to solve and helps them build web-based solutions to social problems – from hacking together some software to working out how to sustain an idea – all in just 48 hours.

In the last two years, we’ve had 350+ ideas submitted, helped create 27 prototype solutions and seen at least 7 of those go on to receive further funding or investment an incorporate as companies. And we’re expecting that number to grow.

Check out Enabled by Design, MyPolice and the GoodGym to see some of the projects we’ve helped get going.

We’re now helping other people run their own Social Innovation Camps in other parts of the world.

Social Innovation Camp is all about taking a back-of-the-envelope idea and prototyping it.

We’re learning a huge amount about what makes an idea fly or flounder as we watch projects develop on from Social Innovation Camps and now we want to build a new way of helping people grow an idea that one stage further: from prototype idea to social startup.

Why Bethnal Green Ventures?

We’re based in the Young Foundation’s building in Bethnal Green, London – just down the road from Silicon Roundabout.

The Foundation’s namesake, Michael Young, was a social reformer responsible for the creation of a number of hugely successful social ventures including the Open University, Which? magazine and Healthline (the precursor of NHS Direct) – all of which started out in the offices we share.

We may be based in East London, but the social ventures we’re working with come from all over the UK – and increasingly around the world.

If you’d like to find out more about Bethnal Green Ventures, you can email us: hello@bethnalgreenventures.com