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Wednesday, 5 March 2014 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
In many ways the first decade of this millennium marks the beginning of the end of the New World Order. If there is one word that can define the past decade, it would be “crisis”. You’ll know what I mean if you just add the word crisis after each of the next set of words: Financial ……, energy ……, food ……, water……, weather…… It was a decade of concentrated, man-made crisis.
Once hailed as the highway to Utopia, “capitalism” has hyper-leaped us to a broken world of inequality, corruption, exhaustion, pollution and extinction. The global West – birthplace of capitalism, has painfully realised that “profiteering” is not only unsustainable, but detrimental to the very existence of the human race. And now they are changing their ways of doing business, and in Richard Branson’s words: “screwing” business-as-usual. This article is the first of a series about that paradigm shift called “Social Innovation”.
Ideas that work
Social Innovation is a term that is used broadly to describe the new ways of “doing” business and everyday “living”. The shortest definition – and my favourite – is “ideas that work”1. Simple it may seem, but has a deeper meaning. A lot of things that we celebrate as “innovative” in fact don’t “work” because they create far worse problems along its process of delivering their purpose.
I’m typing this article on a laptop. It weighs about four kilograms (roughly nine loaves of bread). However, if I count everything that was processed and distilled into those four kilograms, my laptop should weigh a staggering 20,000 kilograms (or 20 Metric Tons2, roughly a Sri Lankan private bus with passengers pouring out of it).
"Social issues by definition affect the whole of society. Therefore individuals, governments and companies are all affected by them one way or another. Social issues are no longer the responsibility of governments and NGOs. They are everybody’s business. As governments around the world are failing to find sustainable solutions to social issues all by themselves, the role of the private sector has come to the forefront. The private sector has started to create social impact"
It contains precious metals extracted from conflict minerals probably from illegal mines, probably by children, probably under harsh conditions, using incredible and untraceable quantities of water and energy. So the laptop maybe an innovative product in the traditional definition, but it is creating a massive trail of social and environmental damage which is not measured in the annual reports.
From the point of manufacturing, if you add the effects of the forward integration of laptops leading to energy wastage, mounting e-waste, cyber-crime, etc. you might even say that it’s the worst invention in the history of mankind. So it’s not working. Instead, what if we create a product that serves the same purpose of a laptop but only cause zero negative impact on the environment and society. Wishful thinking you’d say, but that’s the type of thinking that led to the idea of a modular smartphone3.
A paradigm shift
Although the definition varies based on the source, the essence of social innovation is “creating new and sustainable solutions that solve social issues at large”. (Social issues and environmental issues cannot be spoken in isolation because they’ve become inseparable. Therefore social issues inherently consist of environmental issues.)
These solutions can come in many forms. It can be a new product or a service. For example the piece of paper that is saving world’s food from spoilage4 or the company that is saving thousands of ex-offenders from re-entering the prisons in the UK5. They may come from for-profit or not-for-profit companies or from partnerships between companies and the government and even from the communities themselves.
Social Enterprises are a new breed of business entities that are at the forefront of social innovation. It can be a new business model or a supply chain that alters the dynamics of a social issue for good. It can be new rules, laws, regulations and policies that solve social challenges or unblock social innovation. It can be a social movement that bring about radical changes to social problems. It is usually revolutionary but can be evolutionary as well. It can be changes in lifestyles shifting from extreme consumerism to meaningful consumption thereby conserving the limited resources for future generations. We will talk about these different delivery models of social innovation in the following articles.
So what?
In this context you might say that social innovation is nothing new, it’s what we do already. The answer is Yes and No. There are classic examples of social innovations all around us. The most popular ones include the Open University, Grameen, Free and Open Source Software, ‘Charity: Water’, Wikipedia, Fair-trade, NHS Direct, Greenpeace, Khan Academy, Amnesty International, Oxfam and the list goes on. In Sri Lanka free education and free health services, and Sarvodaya Shramadana Movement can be identified as social innovations when they were first introduced. Today however, the Social Innovation landscape is barren in Sri Lanka.
The Joint Apparel Associations Forum (JAAF) when it was first launched prevented a major social crisis but is yet to solve the larger social issues around the apparel sector. Dialog Ezy Cash has the potential to become one of the best social innovations in our time if they are able to develop social products such as low-cost health insurance and crowd-funding platforms. Divi Neguma is a government-led initiative that has the potential to become an enabler for social innovation if delivered efficiently and effectively. There could be many other individual cases which if scaled and sustained could become actual social innovations.
Beyond CSR, sustainability and corporate citizenship
But what about the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) work? This is a hot-spot for debate. While radical social entrepreneurs like Liam Black argue that CSR is dead, there is still a strong argument for CSR especially among the corporate communities. While the developed economies are shifting from standalone CSR and sustainability initiatives to social innovation models such as Creating Shared Value (CSV), in Sri Lanka CSR seems to hover between genuine business transformation, feel-good corporate philanthropy, transactional and temporary projects, and passive marketing tactic.
Research tells us that there is confusion and ambiguity among the local as well as multinational corporations about what CSR really means and should be. Interestingly, some early definitions of CSR are in fact almost identical to that of modern Social Innovation concept. There is no doubt that CSR and its derivatives (sustainability, corporate citizenship) are still the best corporate tools we have to at least marginally address social issues in countries like Sri Lanka which do not have systems, policies, leadership and thinking matured enough to move beyond CSR.
While there are some amazing examples of innovative micro and macro level CSR work in Sri Lanka, their long-term sustainability, alignment to the real social needs and scalability are inconclusive. One of the strongest criticisms of CSR is the lack of collaboration. The truth is that no social issue can be solved by one company alone. Social Innovation embodies a breakthrough vision for the future that is beyond CSR, sustainability and corporate citizenship.
Social issues redefined
That brings us to an important question: what are these social issues? Societies are the building blocks of human civilisations. From the earliest Palaeolithic hunters and gatherers to the modern Facebookers and Tweeps, the aggregation of individuals and their complex interactions with each other, and their environments has been the essential law of human development. Technology has broken the traditional limits of societies such as geography, economy, culture and even politics.
It is important that we understand societies in that broad dynamic context rather than the traditional notion of a collection of individuals and their relationships. Therefore any problem that affects societies and threatens progression of human civilisation can be identified as a social issue. From macro-level global issues such as war, terrorism, poverty and inequality, water scarcity, aging, global warming, pollution, human trafficking and energy crisis to sectoral issues such as child-labour, corruption, financing and access to healthcare and education, unemployment and underemployment, and crime to micro-level issues (not based on importance) such as alcoholism, domestic violence, rape, abortion, drug abuse and addiction, and malnutrition, the long list of social issues keeps growing.
Social issues by definition affect the whole of society. Therefore individuals, governments and companies are all affected by them one way or another. Social issues are no longer the responsibility of governments and NGOs. They are everybody’s business. As governments around the world are failing to find sustainable solutions to social issues all by themselves, the role of the private sector has come to the forefront. The private sector has started to create social impact. Let’s look at some interesting examples in the next article
(The writer can be reached via [email protected]. Share your views: #beyond2020. The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author.)
Footnotes
1 Social innovation what it is, why it matters and how it can be accelerated, Geoff Mulgan with Simon Tucker, Rushanara Ali and Ben Sanders, Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship, University of Oxford
2 Screw Business as Usual, Richard Branson
3 www.phonebloks.com
4 www.fenugreen.com
5 www.blueskydevelopment.co.uk
