When I was at Purpose, we worked with a project involving a large German auto manufacturer on a social innovation project. They came with an open brief of wanting to apply their design, engineering, and business know-how to the issue of access to clean water in India. This project started as a social intrapreneurship thing within the corporation, they approached Purpose, a consultancy, with their idea. As part of our work, we helped match them with a social enterprise in India that was already doing work on the issue of affordable clean drinking water, but could use the financial and human resources to scale.
I guess in this case, it was a matter of matchmaking. It just happened that somebody at Purpose was connected with somebody from McKinsey who was connected with the social entrepreneur based in India. One of those 2-3 degrees of separation stuff. It's tricky to get right all the time, but we should definitely brainstorm ways to facilitate this kind of matchmaking.
Ashoka has a model they call Hybrid Value Chains that are aimed at building alliances between intrapreneurs and entrepreneurs. Check out: https://www.ashoka.org/hvc.
Our work at the Lab in building communities focused on systems change in finance means that we must place great effort in bringing different parts of the system together in order to collaborate. In our communities we typically have innovators (social entrepreneurs) who are creating brand new ideas or alternative business models, advocates (early adopters) who are promoting and influencing people using these new alternative ideas, and early mainstream (social intrapreneurs) who are looking to innovate and scale new innovation.
We bring together these people in larger assemblies, to build alliances between them and collaborate around specific topics. These topics often relate to ‘leverage points’ in the financial system where people people new innovation can create the greatest impact/change.
One specific example of how we do this is our Transforming Finance community that has just launched a documentary resulting from a two year collaborative project discussing different perspectives and how we can work systemically to bring about change in the UK financial system (http://buff.ly/18lzlQ8)
it's funny because i think a lot of this proprietary nature of companies is a quite modern invention that owes to the valuation of R&D departments by investors. R&D use to be something (back in industrial times) that spanned a sector: all boats will rise -type thang. but now it is how companies get evaluated so their is incentive to hold this "mine" mindset.
We're seeing more and more that the most catalytic change is occurring when we've had cross-sector and cross-disciplinary partnerships.
Project Red was a great example where there was a partnership between entrepreneurs on the ground and evangelists within companies to create a collective and series of products around fighting Aids in Africa.
This is happening increasingly in education technology where you have many new entrepreneurs working in tandem with teachers and administrators who passionate to champion new solutions - collectively they are developing new models for education.
Not sure I can give a good example of systemic collaborations in community setting. I do read crs reports of big business great collaborations on projects.
I guess this isn't suprising as we know that innovation is a function of, among other things, diveristy. What's happening now is that harnessing diveristy can be accomplished outside of the corporate, as well as inside. So it opens many, many more routes to solutions.
This is a solid model! At Imperative, we're thinking through this in a similar way - although our new platform is online, we're very much measuring our success based on the offline and thinking holistically how we can enable multidisciplinary groups to form around discovering and acting on 'purpose.' We think about the process of gaining purpose at five levels all the way from committing and participating to sharing, leading and finally catalyzing. We're finding that they're merit in connecting people who are at different stages of that progression, which, in a lot of ways, speaks to your model Russell.
That brings us to the end of this live session. Thanks everyone for such a great conversation! We'll leave the discussion open, so please feel free to continue posting comments.
Thanks all, was an honor to with you and to read such incredible insight. Thanks for moderating, Zahid. I'm online at http://twitter.com/arthurwoods. Cheers!
I saw this great blog on the myths of innovation and have, albeit crudely in places, tried to illustrate in ways familiar to me in the field of international development.
Core innovation involves making incremental changes to improve existing products for existing customers--think selling laundry detergent in capsule form (smaller fertiliser packs for smallholders in Tanzania co-created through learning why uptake of larger packs were so poor and rejected). Development aid needs some practice coming up with ideas that will change everything, but it is unwise to let the pursuit of the breakthrough overshadow the many smaller initiatives that sustain a business over the long run.
Most companies lack processes to decide which ideas to pursue, much less ways to measure their success. Donors have some but are very bureaucratic and typically just validate political decisions. Picking the right ideas starts with being clear about your company's mission. A cool idea that excites your private sector development advisers should never become a working project until someone can articulate how it actually solves a pressing problem that your ‘customers’ (ministries, farmers etc..) have.
Innovation is often associated with the visionary, who invents something new and is first to market. And that's a great strategy--if you're patenting a blockbuster drug. But if your aim is for institutions and poor people to accept and retain products and services aid delivers to support them, research tells us that there are advantages to arriving late to the party: Nintendo vs. Atari, Amazon vs. Book.com, Google vs. Yahoo. In a 2010 study, University of Chicago researchers Stanislav Dobrev and Aleksios Gotsopoulos found that companies that enter new industries at an early stage actually have a first-mover disadvantage, failing at a much higher rate than those that wait. Can not think of a equivalent in the aid industry.
Most companies focus most of their innovation efforts on new products and product extensions, according to research by the consultancy Doblin. But these kinds of innovations, it turns out, are the least likely to return their cost of investment, with a success rate of only 4.5 percent. Instead, Doblin found, companies get the highest return on investment when they focus on things such as improving business models, internal processes, and beneficiary experiences. For example, though Apple is rightly famous for well-designed devices, he says, "Apple's most valuable innovation is the iTunes store." Similarly, Amazon makes little money on Kindle sales. The device's real value comes from the way Amazon has linked it to its massive inventory of e-books. Think about how governments and donors enable access to what aid delivers and that places at its heart choice of what is on offer..
Spending on R&D has little to do with results. Agriculture and development…..?! Measuring innovation properly means getting away from looking at inputs--that is, your R&D dollars--and focusing on the outputs that your efforts are generating with customers. "Unless you can show that customers and clients are getting more value from your new offerings (ie, not just rate of return studies but, Uma Lele says, how and to what extent the local extension (public and private) services are picking up on outputs and farmers are accepting them"it's less likely to be innovation and more likely to be waste. In its annual Global Innovation 1000 study, the consulting group Booz & Company has consistently found no correlation between a company's research and development spending and how innovative it is ranked by peers. What's more, it has found no relationship between R&D dollars and financial performance. In Booz's most recent survey, from 2012, the top 10 R&D spenders actually underperformed their industry peers in terms of both market capitalization and revenue growth. Apple, ranked as the most innovative company for the past three years, spends just 2.2 percent of its sales on R&D efforts. That's well below the industry average of 6.5 percent for computing and electronics and far less than rivals such as Google, Samsung, and Microsoft. In fact, Apple ranks 53rd among the 1,000 top R&D spenders in all industries.
Sorry for the length of this, but though it interesting.