Giving Compass' Take:

• Social Capital Markets reports on a summit featuring four prominent women entrepreneurs, emphasizing the lessons about social innovation learned from each.

• Is the nonprofit world giving women entrepreneurs enough of an opportunity to succeed? One main takeaway from this piece is that they are energized and ready to make real progress in the world.

• Read about JP Morgan's big investment in women entrepreneurs of color in the tech industry.

Four bold and brilliant entrepreneurs took the stage at the World Changing Women’s Summit, hosted by Conscious Company Media on February 20-22, 2018, and reminded the audience that a woman with a plan can defy the odds (only 17% of founders are female and only 2% of early stage funding goes to women) and change the world.

Apologizing for the analogy, Courtney Klein, co-founder and CEO of Seed Spot, said that an entrepreneur with an idea is like having a raspberry seed stuck in your molar (hence the name, Seed Spot!) — it is impossible to leave it alone until the seed makes it out in the world. Klein launched her successful first venture, New Global Citizens just after graduating from college. The lack of resources she found during her own experience as an early-stage entrepreneur led her to launch Seed Spot as a support network of space, mentorship, and capital for social entrepreneurs.

In pursuit of fresh ice cream made with real ingredients, Robyn Sue Fisher of Smitten Ice Cream learned everything she could about the ice cream industry — including attending courses at the Penn State University Creamery while she was a student at Stanford Graduate School of Business — and then threw all the conventional methods out the window. Her determination to invent a mixer that would produce fresh ice cream from natural ingredients within minutes, enabling on-the-spot scoops for every customer, required years of tinkering the recipe and the machine, and defying the status quo. She encouraged aspiring entrepreneurs to take action, coupled with naive optimism: get out there and start creating before discovering all the information that might slow an entrepreneur down.

Read the full article about lessons from women entrepreneurs at Social Capital Markets.