: something's up : roi ... sroi ... eroi ... ??? roi :

... has anybody seen anything pulling together the thinking on ROI ... 'return on investment' from a broader scale than simply a capital or business perspective? if you have, can you send it my way? thanks.

... a key plank in Homer-Dixon's theory is EROI : ENERGY return on investment ... shifts are tectonic because they are taking place below the surface, away from view - shifting today’s globalized society from low-EROI (easy fossil fuels and resources; easy economy) to high-EROI systems ( difficult fossil fuel extraction, and possibly therefore creative alternative fuels, but more difficult economic realities, as seen in 2008 with ripple effect of the bio-fuels on food supplies ).

... then there's the How to Change the World book I've been reading which is talking about SROI : SOCIAL return on investment. Wikipedia suggests ... SROI is an attempt to measure the social and financial value created by a non profit, NGO or business. It has not been proven to drive increased investment, but it is popular with academics and some consultancies. A number of services are now looking at analysing the 'investment' in charities as yielding a social return on investment. Development Ratings is an example of a new type of organization springing up to help private donors evaluate and research charities that work in the developing countries.

SROI is an approach to understanding and managing the impacts of a project, an organisation or a policy. It is based on stakeholders and puts financial values on the important impacts identified by stakeholders which do not have market values. The aim is to include the values of people that are often excluded from markets in the same terms as used in markets, that is money, in order to give people a voice in resource allocation decisions.

London Business School has an SROI primerthat also looks interesting.

Yikes, like that great line somewhere between the 1:05 and 1:20 mark ( depending on the version ) in the Trews Paranoid Freak ... "I'm a man on the brink, I've had too much to think" I'd better quit now ( official video/strange ... live YouTube/rough ... acoustic YouTube/better ... AOL/slow loading! ).

Apparently these are the kind of questions I ponder when not consumed with a full time job? My FaceBook status this morning pondered whether I'd go to church or not, and this is the answer ... 'blogging instead. Is that legit? Hope so ... kinda like Church of St.Arbucks ... or Church of the Mattress ... the 'blogging equivalent being ... Blogger Baptist?

dlc