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How can informal enterprise help business adapt to a permanent state of chaos?

We live in turbulent times of rapid change, increased interconnectivity and rising socio-economic complexity. Ambiguity is our new constant. It is clear that top-down organizations optimised for efficiency need to shift towards more adaptive structures and platforms. They are not built for ambiguity.

Yet, amidst this chaos, informal enterprises are proliferating -- in both emerging and declining markets. Makeshift start-ups, sharing networks, and micro-businesses are expanding, and respond more nimbly to immediate opportunities and needs. We believe these are not fringe alternatives, but socially and economically desirable choices for an ambiguous world. Our aim is to find ways to create more adaptive businesses that harness the elasticity of informal enterprise, as well as to find ways to learn from, enable, and share value with them.

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Adaptive Business & Informal Enterprise

Following the conversation initiated by the Informal Economy Blog and Symposium, at Claro Partners, we recently completed a global research titled Adaptive Business & Informal Enterprise. For this research we focused on micro-businesses as bridge builders between formal and informal practices, and talked to various micro-businesses in New York, Nairobi, Sao Paulo, Shanghai and Barcelona. Many [...]

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Excerpts from the Informal Economy Symposium

Excerpts from the Informal Economy Symposium: Why Informal Enterprise Matters from Claro Partners on Vimeo. During the symposium we had many conversations with the individual speakers about why informal economies matter today. This video highlights some of the reasons.  You can watch the full talks of the first panel symposium speakers on the Claro Partners Vimeo channel. We be uploading [...]

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Notes on The Informal Economy Symposium

We are still chewing on all the great presentations, panels, workshops, and discussions from last week’s symposium.  Some key questions we addressed were: How do we begin to make informal economies legible? Why does informality matter now? What does it indicate about the future of society and business? The symposium brought together a group of [...]