Social Innovation Generation

During my studies at the Richard Ivey School of Business, many of my peers believed business and sustainability were an oxymoron. Numerous students thought investing in sustainable practices meant hurting company profits. Fortunately, professors introduced us to triple bottom line theories, social innovation and sustainability frameworks, which proved that companies can and should integrate environmental and social outcomes into their business strategy. Since that time I have been following the business sustainability world closely. For this post I’d like to offer my perspective on this compelling field including sharing news of an exciting tool called Sustainability-Oriented Innovation.

We are entering a turbulent period of re-thinking how companies can best serve people, planet, as well as profit.  Disruptive events like the 2008 financial crisis have opened new dialogues on the role of corporations in society, such as Bill Gates’ call at Davos for Creative Capitalism. A growing number of organizations, like Volans’ Breakthrough Capitalism, are making the case that “business as usual” is insufficient to meet the environmental and social challenges our 21st century world faces. These thought leaders, like John Elkington, are calling upon firms to change the way we do business. Novel frameworks are sprouting forth, such as Corporate Shared Value and Corporate Social Innovation, that encourage companies to re-examine and re-formulate their business strategy.

In partnership with Ivey’s Network for Business Sustainability, Dr. Richard Adams of the University of Exeter designed a thought-provoking framework, Sustainability-Oriented Innovation (SOI), which illuminates the path towards positive corporate change. Through applying SOI, firms can learn how to more directly contribute to the environments that allow them to be profitable.

What is SOI?

Sustainability-oriented innovation, or SOI is a “deliberate change made to products, processes, services, organizations, or wider systems that delivers environmental, social and economic value.” Simplified, SOI means doing something different to improve the well-being of our environment, communities and finances.

Why does SOI matter?

Similar to Corporate Social Responsibility, the impetus to do SOI is driven by tightening regulations, consumer pressure, and risk to company reputation. No longer can corporations ignore being accountable for damaging aspects of their supply chain, as the recent Bangladesh clothing factory collapse illustrated for Loblaws and its Joe Fresh brand. Greater engagement by consumers and the public, accelerated by the higher octane fuel of social media, are making it increasingly impossible for corporations to overlook the social and environmental imperatives underpinning their business models.

Stages of SOI

Importantly, not only does SOI involve incremental change like CSR, but it also reaches organizational and systemic level transformation.

There are three main stages to SOI, diagrammed below:

Stage 1:  Operational Optimization

The firm takes a structured approach to incrementally improving sustainability, through tools like ISO 14001 (ie: CSR) Think: Reduce Harm

Stage 2:  Organizational Transformation

The firm integrates sustainability into the corporate culture, becoming the status quo. (ie: Supply Chain Management) Think: Create Shared Value

 Stage 3:  Systems Building

The firm’s sustainability strategy is explicitly embedded within the greater system.  (ie: Biomimicry or Backcasting) Think: Net Positive Impact

Source: Network for Business Sustainability. 2012. Innovating for sustainability: A guide for executives. London, Canada: Network for Business Sustainability. www.nbs.net/knowledge.

How can SOI assist business?

SOI challenges corporations to drive sustainability more deeply into their strategy. When a firm reviews the above framework, they must consider their purpose for innovating. Are they doing it to reduce costs? Leverage their core competency? Begin collaborative partnerships? Or transform their products into services? Through applying SOI, business leaders can better understand which stage the firm is at (if any), where the firm should be, and how to go about achieving that goal.

The SOI framework is one of an encouraging new set of tools to support next stage corporate sustainability efforts. Although it serves as an excellent starting point, the transition from Organizational Optimization to Systems Building is non-linear and uncertain. Many variables, including a firm’s core competency, committed leadership, competitive environment, suppliers, consumers (think Porter’s 5 Forces), impact the ability for a firm to embed sustainability into its core being.

Want to learn more?

SOI’s third stage “Systems Building” bears notable similarities to Frances Westley’s systems-based work on resilience and social innovation. Westley’s most recent article published in the Stanford Social Innovation Review explains how highly resilient systems support innovation creation.

For more on SOI, visit the Network for Business Sustainability, where you can find the research team’s full report on Innovating for Sustainability. Parallel and complementary cutting-edge research from the Doughty Centre for Corporate Responsibility investigates the role of the Social Intrapreneur as “an extra force for sustainability.” These resources are just a handful of the many that are helping corporations integrate sustainability into their business strategy.

About the author: Devon Krainer is a recent graduate from the Richard Ivey School of Business. Currently working at Social Innovation Generation (SiG), Devon loves investigating and disseminating new ways for business to serve society. Start a conversation with Devon

Note: This blog originally appeared on the MaRS site on February 27, 2013

A colourful mix of designers, policy-makers, consultants, non-profit professionals, lab practitioners and the lab curious crowded into the MaRS auditorium last Thursday night to hear Frances Westley’s latest insights on the emerging field of labs and the potential of labs to generate and scale social innovation.

With decades of experience researching and writing about complexity and systems science (including co-authoring the bestselling book Getting to Maybe: How the World is Changed) it is no wonder that Frances sold out the auditorium (which has a capacity of nearly 400 people), with 100 people wait-listed two weeks prior to the highly anticipated event.

Here is why we need social innovation labs and why this process is exciting.

The magnitude of change is daunting

The need has never been greater for systemic change. In Canada, much like in the rest of the world, we are facing increasingly complex social and environmental issues, such as the widening of income inequalities, the need to develop policy for aboriginal education that respects native culture and language, and the implementation of clean energy initiatives.

What’s more, we are experiencing pressure from new drivers and externalities (such as climate change, aging populations and government austerity measures, not to mention citizens’ frustration over some public service systems that have remained more or less unchanged since the Industrial Revolution) that put additional strain on our systems. Traditional approaches to building solutions are having difficulty coping with this kind of complexity.

The love child: The best of both lab worlds

Frances offers Social Innovation Labs (#SocInnLabs)—the love child of Change Labs and Design Labs—as a process for tackling these types of complex challenges. What is particularly exciting about her approach is that it blends the best from these two robust processes and adds another dimension based on complexity and systems theory. For example, deep collaboration among diverse groups of people using a highly designed process (a strength of the Change Lab approach) and extensive ethnographic and desk research (a strength of the Design Lab approach) will both be key elements of the Social Innovation Lab process.

Through collaboration with Christian Bason (MindLab), Bryan Boyer (Helsinki Design Lab), Banny Banerjee (d.school: Institute of Design at Stanford) and Luigi Ferrara (Institute without Boundaries), Frances has teased out two key elements from her research to add around prototyping and scaling:

• Prototyping for complexity: It is not possible to “hold the whole system in one’s mind,” explains Frances. Social Innovation Labs offer computer visualizations and simulations to address the difficulty of applying rapid prototyping techniques to complex systems, such as social and political dynamics and the variables and relationships within these elements.
• Looking across scales: Where are the key constraints that stop change from happening? Frances advocates moving up through scale to find the leverage points that have an impact on changing the rules and relationships that govern the system in the first place. For example, with regards to youth offenders, she says, innovation in government ministries may make more of an impact than a program or initiative on the ground.

Frances’ work on Social Innovation Labs is in full swing, with a test model and an open source process guide to be available in the summer 2013.

If you’re hungry for more news on this topic, the University of Waterloo has a webpage dedicated to Social Innovation Labs, the SiG website has links to lab-related resources and the SiG Knowledge Hub has a lab section (including an introduction, dip and dive) that offers a smooth transition into these emerging processes.

We remove our wet boots at the entrance to L’Espace La Fontaine on a typical snowy February morning in Montreal. Located in the middle of a park with a skate rental shop downstairs and a frozen lake nearby, the upstairs of the building had been transformed to host about 115 men and women participating in The Art of Hosting – a three-day workshop exploring how to create spaces for meaningful conversations. In the wake of 2012 Quebec university student protests, the participants were eager to tackle social problems with fresh ideas.

Phonekerchief

Here are two highlights from the three-day workshop: connecting and harvesting

1.  Arriving, Connecting and Being Present

Overheard at a meeting near you: “The sooner we get down to business, the sooner we can get back to work”. Our fast-paced lives push us to jump straight into serious discussion at meetings, cutting the fat (small talk) to get to the meat (business). But how do rushed interactions affect the quality of collaborations and relationships? Ignoring the crucial step of settling in and establishing connection among fellow meeting participants can result in lost attention (manifested in the form of checking emails and tapping away on smartphones while others talk) and, over the longer-term, prevents deeper relationships and trust to form. In other words, not making time to connect makes effective collaboration very difficult and negates the whole point of coming together in the first place. Particularly in lab settings, where compressed timeframes are the norm and deep collaboration is necessary, building in time to connect is crucial.

I experienced both sides of the coin during one of the exercises at the training. All of the training participants separated into groups of three to work on a respective group member’s, real-life work challenge. Due to some confusion, though, my group of three arrived a half hour late to our designated table. We felt the time crunch (!) and began haphazardly proceeding through the exercise barely having taken off our jackets. That’s when we decided to stop and take a moment to properly ‘arrive’.  We each shared past experiences relevant to the project, enabling us to build a shared understanding of our individual lenses and connect with one another. By the end of the exercise, we were laughing with one another and had come up with actionable items to help our group member, Marco, move forward with his project. Taking a moment to settle in and connect made the remaining half hour productive and fun, reminding me that it doesn’t have to be one or the other.

Resources

• Here is an inspiring story of citizens coming together in Columbus Ohio that was shared at the training by Tuesday Ryan-Hart (this written version is by Margaret Wheatley)
• Non-violent communication (NVC), a practice of communicating with compassion, also emphasizes connecting and practicing empathy with one another prior to collaborating.

Mackin Ink

2. Visual Learning and Harvesting

Incorporating illustrations and stories that anchor in emotions can make even dull meeting summaries and report-backs come to life. This is the premise behind the art of harvesting, a parallel practice to the art of hosting. What’s important about harvesting is: actively listening to the whole room, capturing the magic from conversation (quotes, stories, compelling points), synthesizing theses bits to pull out underlying messages and themes, and creating a meaningful record of the conversation that inspires action. Before attending the training, I understood harvesting to be synonymous with graphic recording (i.e. “capturing people’s ideas and expressions—in words, images and color—as they are being spoken in the moment” World Café definition). With so many creative people at the training, my eyes were opened to many forms I had never considered including: poetry and spoken word, photography, singing, ukulele playing, and improvised dance. It was unexpected and refreshing to experience a report back in such creative ways.

Some harvesting resources:

• Chris Corrigan wrote a great blog post on strategic harvesting
• Images pack more information than words: Interesting blog post about how Chinese characters convey information more quickly than English words
• Other books that advocate for visual learning: The Back of the Napkin, Blah Blah Blah, Visual Meetings, Business Model Generation
• There is a growing community of graphic facilitators in Toronto and a meet-up led by Patricia Kambitch of Playthink

Memorable lines from the training

• “what is set in stone and what is set in clay?” Tuesday Ryan-Hart referring to constraint and possibility
• “we grow in the direction of the questions we ask” – David Cooperrider (Appreciative Inquiry Guru)
• Organizational principals not as rules but rather as conversations we’d like to have (“how are we doing with transparency”)
• “A person who cannot ask for help cannot be trusted”
• “Let’s renew our vows with community”

My journey in the Graduate Diploma in Social Innovation continued last month, this time in Guelph, Ontario. Once again 30 participants were absorbed in complexity and design thinking, with the added bonus of some terrific presentations on the nature and history of consumerism and lessons in anticipating and planning for system change.

c/o Edgewater Bricolage

There’s an enormous store of takeaways I could write about, but conscious of your time, I’ll focus on three:

• Bricolage – a French word meaning, the creation of something new from a diverse range of things that happen to be available
• The question of translation
• Big picture thinking

Bricolage

Perhaps this concept stood out most for me as I hear my SiG colleagues often talking about, not the invention of something totally new that will transform the systems we live in, but a new configuration of existing resources that will enable us to live more resilient, sustainable lives. Understanding this means we are likely sitting on the very means to procure the outcomes we seek.

This is an important takeaway for our SiG work in Social Innovation Labs too. Through the application of design thinking methodologies in a lab-like environment where various wicked questions can be explored, prototypes developed, testing done, simulation techniques applied to see possible futures, the hope is we will be able to reconfigure current resources in such a way to produce positive outcomes.

There are two caveats to this; designing possibilities is one way to coordinate things but won’t create change on its own. We will need both the ability to recognize and seize opportunity when it presents itself; then we must tackle the tricky business of translation.

The question of translation

Here’s where things start to sound a bit technical, and I have to admit to a certain degree of frustration in reading about it prior to the module starting. However, in the way they do best, program directors Frances Westley and Brenda Zimmerman were able to make it comprehensible.

I found the best way to understand translation in this context was to think about it by way of example. Adrian Smith, who has written about translation used organic food as a case study. The organic food movement began as a niche movement – a reaction to multiple concerns people had with the mainstream food system. As the organic movement grew stronger, its influence was felt by the mainstream with some members of the movement talking with mainstream players about getting organic food into supermarkets, into regular distribution channels and so on. In the uptake of organic food at supermarkets, the ethos of the organic movement was translated to make it accessible to regular businesses and consumers. For some in the original niche movement, they felt that uptake by the mainstream was antithetical to their passion, and they reacted by setting up new distribution systems – organizing organic food box programs and the like.

Translation across different levels of a system takes place as people work to find a foothold and grow their innovation. Anticipating the translation, an innovator can be better prepared for some of the questions that will likely arise. For example, in the organic food case:

• Did the organic movement lose purity in the translation of their movement into supermarkets?
• Did the mainstream distributors actually change their thinking at all about how food should be produced?
• Would the likes of food box programs have evolved if the uptake of organic food in supermarkets didn’t take place?
• Is the uptake by mainstream distributors a win in general for the organic movement, despite the loss of purity?
• Have more people’s attitudes towards food production and organic food options changed because of the uptake by mainstream distributors?

How to answer these questions requires more space than I have room (or adequate knowledge), but all this to say, translation between niche movements, mainstream (aka regime) level organizations, and the values people hold, is a rich area for study and definitely something to think about as innovations are developed.

Big picture

One of the presentations still resonating with me as I reflect on Module 2 was by Stephen Quilley on the Paradoxes of Culture.  What I found very interesting in this presentation was his articulation of the possible negative impacts of a well-intentioned intervention in a system. He also covered the history of consumer society and how incredibly resilient it is. It’s a formidable opponent no doubt. As we further explore the details and obvious merits of innovative methodologies like Collaborative Consumption, questions I am thinking about still include:

• If we adopted Collaborative Consumption methods wholesale, what parts of the economic and welfare systems would be affected?
• What new “versions” of the economic and welfare systems could be developed to enable broad uptake of zero waste societies?

Quilley’s presentation was well balanced by Mark Weber’s presentation on the lessons for a social innovator trying to change behaviour. One great lesson that helps round out this blog is that if you’re thinking about changing attitudes, it may well be best to concentrate on changing the conditions around people that influence their behavior – not give people a whole bunch of information and expect things to change.

Technically I’m nearly halfway through the diploma program and continue to have more questions than answers, but I love the questions and the thinking of possible answers regardless. In blog 3 on the program I expect to write more deeply on the development of our team project, which will hopefully be taking shape.  It will put to the test many of the lessons from the first two modules. I’ll make sure to keep you posted.

Note: this is the second in a series of posts about my participation in the Graduate Diploma in Social Innovation. Read the first post here.

SiG is proud to announce its new partnership with premium specialty channel eqhd to present an inspirational new program called The Real Solutions Series, premiering Tuesday, December 18 at 8pm ET/5pm PT, during eqhd’s National Free Preview.

Geoff Mulgan speaks at MaRS, April 2012

Led by some the world’s leading social innovation thinkers and entrepreneurs, including author Adam Kahane and Chief Executive of NESTA, Geoff Mulgan, the The Real Solutions Series presents new ideas and real possibilities for solving some of Canada’s most pressing social problems from public service innovation to designing for change. You may have had a chance to see these events in person in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal or Vancouver. Now they are available as highlights with our new partner!

SiG is committed to providing Canadians with the resources and ideas they can use to accelerate positive social change across the country. eqhd is committed to informing Canadians with thought-provoking programming. This makes eqhd the perfect partner for this work.

While many complex day to day problems don’t seem to have any solutions, Blue Ant Media’s Presentation Director, Lori DeGraw says eqhd is proud to work with SiG to present discussions and possible solutions to Canada’s most complex social issues.

The Real Solutions Series’ events and online discussions join the eqhd lineup of unflinching documentaries and critically acclaimed series, Tuesday, December 18 at 8pm ET/5pm PT.

If you’re not a subscriber to eqhd yet, you can take advantage of their Free Preview during December and January 2013. Visit their site to find out where eqhd broadcasts in your city.

It may seem odd to start a blog post with talk of toasters, but in a conversation with Bryan Boyer this month, that is where the discussion took us. Bryan is the strategic design lead for Helsinki Design Lab, a division of Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, and he reminded those assembled at the MaRS Global Leadership event on November 13 that once humans developed the capacity to generate electricity, all sorts of inventions became possible.
(more…)

It’s easy to forget that as humans we live in a complex web of systems both natural and manmade. Even a simple trip to work requires interacting with multiple systems – transportation, legal and economic systems among them, as well as the cooperation of the people traveling alongside you through a series of behaviourial norms we usually don’t notice.

Late last month I began the Graduate Diploma in Social Innovation designed and taught by our partners at SiG@Waterloo. As they declare on their homepage, “If you are seeking creative solutions to big problems, open to exploring and utilizing multiple and cross-cutting perspectives, and eager to develop the habits of thought and strategic skills necessary to make transformative change possible, this program was designed with you in mind.”
(more…)