Our Product: WE BRING YOU AN EDGE.
Who is this for? Large public EU institutions, the private sector, and the social sector
What do we do? We help courageous change actors scaleup, turning the challenges of digitization, AI, and population shifts into opportunities. By grafting a Californian entrepreneurship mind set on European social traditions, we focus on maximizing social impact through innovative solutions for the public good.
Our goal is to democratize the access to innovation by developing an inclusive entrepreneurship ecosystem. Sky(lark) Europe is our R&D Lab where we constantly refine fast moving processes and get them ready to implement in large, slow-moving systems with the goal of solving local issues.
We push organizations to look at innovative models to create change, we consult on the development of more effective operational frameworks, look at new potential revenue models, and explore more robust avenues for financial sustainability for all the entities we work with. Additionally, we help corporations add a social impact model to their business model in order to strengthen communities, boost revenue with Millennial and Gen Z customers, and create positive PR.
How do we do it? As 4th Sector architects, we co-create effective methodologies for change filling the existing gap between large public EU institutions, the private sector, and the social sector with Californian innovation, extracting value from decades of experience, and constantly learning from this cross-pollinating work. We excel in empowering the people driving the change.
With a strong understanding of how Europe works plus knowledge from US’s advanced ecosystem of entrepreneurial innovation, we hold at the center the differences between the EU and US, taking the best of both environments, and creating an edge that we are excited to offer to new European partners.
We are focusing on approaches that are large scale, collaborative, creative and continuous, thus increasing the sustainability of their collective impact.
Where? Provisionally located in Brussels, Sky(lark) Europe is our beachhead into the EU – with a 2018-2019 strategy to continue our good work in Germany, expand into Italy, and explore the entrepreneurial landscape in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.
Why? We are of two worlds – Cristina Gallegos was born in Europe and has deep experience living in the US. Our mission is to bring American entrepreneurship, creativity, and innovation to the European social sector, actively galvanizing public/private partnerships, looking for local problems to solve, and stimulating social solutions that are begging to be brought to market.
In the past 19 years, we have equipped enterprising non-profits and mission-driven for-profits, as well as foundations and academic institutions with new intelligence to guide their strategies and inspire innovative solutions. We are actively looking for EU partners, funders, and projects to dive into.
For more information, contact Max Bobbitt, Operations Director, Sky(lark) Europe.
Current projects we are pursuing:
- Applied Foresight – an effort to move a large number of EU NGOs from grantseeking to a social enterprise model of financial sustainability
- Sky(lark) Center for Democracy, Social Enterprise, and AI in Tuscany, Italy
- Venit Tempus – an initiative designed to help academic institutions adapt to the tectonic shifts that are going to fundamentally disrupt the education market as a result of AI/automation, changes in learning modalities and in the education market, the Future of Learning and the Future of Work). Venit Tempus (Latin for “the time has come) is a new strategic model rooted in research of student-market-fit plus Design Thinking/Human Centered Design meant to be tailored for each academic institution, and put them on a path to become the best in their domain
- Sky(lark) + Hamburg – a potential partnership with the City of Hamburg and social sector partners with the goal to help refugees by providing an infusion of Silicon Valley entrepreneurial know-how for micro-enterprises, young entrepreneurs and the unemployed, with the idea to boost employment/getting more people into jobs, especially the most vulnerable people on the labor market.
- RevolutionOf.Connections – a 3 years, multicultural, multifaceted experiential campaign designed to raise awareness around values Germans and Americans share, celebrating commonalities and exploring the Waldorf cultural relevance in the U.S. It is intended to build friendships across the Atlantic and crowdsourcing solutions from California eastward, targeting social disconnect and environmental concerns.