Great comments. I encourage our audience participants to share their thoughts and examples!
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In reply to Maggie:
External engagement and Unlocking new business - social innovation can provide opportunities to work with, collaborate and partnership with organisations and other businesses. For example ViiV (which was spun out from GlaxoSmithKline (76.5%); Pfizer (13.5%); Shionogi (10%) and is now a joint venture treating and aiming to eradicate HIV. Their portfolio of twelve HIV treatments generated annual sales of £2.3 billion in 2015
This is a money making organisation with a very focused social purpose.
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I’ve been a long time believer in the fact that social challenge, the SDGs if you will, are in fact business opportunities in disguise. How we feed and educate the next billion on the planet, provide them with water and sanitation, healthcare, clean energy - you get the idea. these are ripe opportunities for business to address. And I also believe that intrapreneurial employees are the ones best placed to identify the opportunities that are at that nexus of business value and societal impact - not the R&D department, nor the CSR folks
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Yes. The Sustainable Development Commission estimates that sustainable business models could open economic opportunities worth up to US$12 trillion and increase employment by up to 380 million jobs by 2030, according to the Business and Sustainable Development Commission.
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Let’s move onto question 2:
I’d be interested to hear if you’ve any examples of where your PULSE employee volunteering programme has been a catalyst for employee driven innovation? My hypothesis is that getting people to think out of the box, is helped if they have an opportunity to “live out of the box” for a period of time. That’s certainly been my experience in Accenture
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Great examples being shared. We’re keen to see more of these and have developed our Business Partnerships Fund to provide support http://www.bifprogramme.org/where-we-work/business-partnerships-fund to innovativions in companies. Pearson and ARM have recently received match funding for initiatives to provide on-line in job support for recent school leavers and a health app for tablets.
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Challenges for intrapreneurs: Ideas may be great but lack buy-in as business leaders are not engaged or have already-set objectives. A possible solution is to get high-level buy-in in advance for company ‘think tanks’. GSK have a Future Strategy Team which spend 6 months exploring new ideas and innovations across 3-4 themes
Challenges that ring very true is a quote from Dr Paul Farmer I was reminded of just this morning: Mountains beyond mountains
How can we collectively help the relentless nature of innovating, developing, scaling and getting buy in at every stage.
This is a HUGE question and brings me onto my favourite topic of “The Corporate Immune System” - the notion that there’s an invisible force or inertia within business of cultural norms, compliance processes, risk management, legal etc that serves to snuff out any new innovative product or service that is not delivering short term impact to the bottom line.
Graham Simpson - one of our League of Intrapreneurs awardees in 2013 was part of the GSK pulse programme and credits this with the inspiration to develop low-cost diagnostic tools for maternal health.
Thanks Gib-yes we have a ‘Bringing the outside in’ forum for returning PULSE volunteers who make suggestions of ideas the company may wish to take up. These are shared with business leaders on returning and the top few (2-3) are selected. I’ll follow up when back on what has happened to last years crop of ideas/innovations!
Another miss I think is similar to ones seen in pure innovation - which is the McKinsey three horizons model, which summarised says that the innovation needs, skills and business minds differ from early idea to scaling an idea to incremental innovation within a scaled programme: https://www.mckinsey.com/business-functions/strategy-and-corporate-finance/our-insights/enduring-ideas-the-three-horizons-of-growth
Therefore should the same intrapreneur be leant on to have to tackle each these horizons?
There are many challenges from:
Time - how do we give intrapreneurs real time to develop their innovations?
Talent - how do we team intrapreneurs up with the right people / skills sets for success?
Culture -how to overcome corporate inertia and this sense that 'this is the way we do things around here’
Strategic - how do we move beyond short-term shareholder focus to long-term, systemic problems solving?
Do we know of any large companies that offer exchange programmes or externships with social enterprises or smaller companies? We have worked well with Bain Consulting who have this which has helped us to develop the garment industry in West Africa but I would love some of my team to have the opportunity to learn from a bigger/corporate environment as well.
I was really inspired by Andrew Kassoy’s presentation this morning at our Skoll Ecosystem event where he shared evidence that companies are re-thinking their governance models.
This is such a massive barrier to scaling social innovation within.
Can you imagine if every corporation was a b-corporation?
GSK run a programme called PULSE which enables employees to work at an NGO for up to 6 months. Most are with large INGOs but some are with smaller enterprises. Do check GSK.com for details on PULSE. I can connect you with someone from the team if that helps too
Caitlin Bristol at J&J mentioned this morning they are doing reverse secondments.
Thank you, yes please do as we have an NGO and a for profit business
Corporate volunteering seems to be an important and growing way that companies are motivating staff and helping generate innovations that can achieve social impacts> DFId has supported VSo to eastblish the Knowledge Exchange programme. Take a look here at what they do https://vsointnew.stage.aws.ixishosting.co.uk/volunteering/international-corporate-volunteering?_ga=2.140489907.1852025184.1523370297-678253576.1523370297