Photo Credit: robin_24

Then, when he had flown a while longer,

Something brightened toward the north,

It caught his eye, they say.

And then he flew right up against it.

He pushed his mind through

And pulled his body after.

These words by Skaay, an oral poet from Haida Gwaii whom many consider British Columbia’s Shakespeare, describe the start of the social innovator’s journey.

Something’s not right. Injustice burns bright. An idea catches your eye. Your imagination takes hold. You push through prevailing wisdom and “the way it’s supposed to be.” With few resources, and no one listening you persist. You answer “yes!” to the disinterested, the doubters, and disbelievers. You innovate.

You create a solution to a challenge faced by a friend, family member, or neighbour. You invent a successful response to a community problem. You improve how we work together. You see a way for your province, your country and your world to be a better place.

You are, in today’s parlance, a social innovator.

The social innovator’s journey begins with a new mindset. A way of thinking that questions the way things are. That asks difficult questions. That has the confidence to make mistakes. That gives the mind as long as possible to come up with something original. That makes links and connections no one thought possible. That breaks an existing logjam or spots a new one.

British Columbia, like every jurisdiction in the world, is faced with its fair share of “logjams.” We also benefit from more than our fair share of natural resources. What we often ignore is our natural creativity – creativity that could be harnessed to address what some commentators call our “wicked problems.”

To address this oversight, a group of BC activists, including business, government, foundations, universities, and community agencies have created BC Ideas. It is a web-based platform designed to attract innovative ideas that improve the quality of our lives, reduce vulnerability, and increase the resilience of our citizens, families, communities, and environment. BC Ideas is really a call to passion, imagination, and creativity.

We know new ideas are being proposed and explored in our kitchens, coffee shops, classrooms, and boardrooms. We know important solutions already exist that could benefit many more. We know great ideas from other parts of the world could be adapted and implemented here.

BC Ideas wants to create opportunities for everyone, young and old, near and far, every organization, every business, and every public servant to contribute.

In return you will:

• Join a community of passionate changemakers
• Profile your ideas and solutions to collaborators, mentors, investors, and funders.

And perhaps most important, have the satisfaction of brightening the future well-being of this corner of the Pacific Northwest.

Visit the BC Ideas website for more details about how to enter.

Last week, Geoff Mulgan, the Chief Executive of Nesta in the United Kingdom, visited Toronto for a whirlwind tour that included an awe-inspiring 22 commitments in four days and five public talks. The diversity of his speaking topics is worth noting: aging, social entrepreneurship, public strategy, community-led innovation, and austerity.

The tour was organized and presented by Social Innovation Generation as part of its Inspiring Action for Social Impact speakers series.

Two of Mulgan’s talks were held at MaRS: one was the closing keynote of the Business of Aging conference, and the other was the MaRS Global Leadership lecture on innovation and austerity, the highlight of the trip.

As a frequent advisor to the UK government, Mulgan is familiar with austerity, and as a leader within the think-tank Demos, The Young Foundation and, currently, Nesta, he is also a leading social innovator.

It was no surprise, then, that the MaRS Auditorium was packed full of Canadians fearing the pinch of budget cuts as the government tries to bring down a deficit. Indeed, this was a truly pan-Canadian conversation, with attendees watching a livestream from nine cities, as far away as British Columbia and Nova Scotia.

Mulgan, however, was a man on a mission: to reframe the debate around austerity and show that fear and fatalism are flawed responses to the crisis at hand. Rather, he posited, embracing the possibility of failure and creating safe spaces for risk are key to dealing with spending freezes and building a sustainable future.

Mulgan began his talk with the question: “Is innovation a luxury of the boom years, or does it become more important during times of austerity?”

He proceeded to note that while the private sector routinely leverages innovation to increase productivity and savings, there are no equivalent measures for the public sector. The government usually thinks of research and development, but only a fraction of the benefits from innovation can be attributed to R&D. This highlights a glaring gap between how we think of innovation in the economy and how it is practised by the public sector.

There seems to be a lack of new ideas that can drive positive change, as evidenced by a chart in Mulgan’s presentation showing that as healthcare spending has risen in OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) countries, adult mortality rates have actually gone up, instead of down.

To deconstruct different approaches toward austerity and highlight opportunities for innovation, Mulgan presented a framework of 12 economies that governments pursued. These can be divided into three broad groups:

1. Traditional, such as selling off assets and freezing hiring
2. Organizational, such as aggregating back-office functions, automating work and reducing failure demand (preventative investment)
3. Relational, such as empowering citizens through community asset transfer, reducing regulation and tapping into social enterprise

Clearly, there are opportunities, but how do we make the most of them? The audience was taken through a six-step process for doing just that, starting with prompts for innovation and leading toward systemic change as the selected approaches scale.

Throughout, Mulgan presented a number of practical tips and examples of how Nesta has applied these six steps to a range of problems in the UK. One tip, for example, was using competitions and prizes to incentivize and foster creative thinking. There are a number of resources available to speed up the prototyping process as well.

One of the most relevant aspects of the talk was how closely it aligned with current MaRS initiatives. For example, Mulgan emphasized the importance of investing in social innovation—which the MaRS Centre for Impact Investing is encouraging by supporting social enterprises and providing recommendations to unlock private capital for public good. He also highlighted the need for institutionalizing innovation in a safe space for failure, and the upcoming MaRS Solutions Lab is as good a start as any, borrowing from the best ideas around the world.

The thing is, shortcuts don’t really work, and innovation is at least partly about destroying things that we love—which is a hard but necessary pill to swallow. Ultimately, Mulgan’s point was that the economic crisis is an opportunity for transforming public service, and that looking at this change with hope, rather than fear, can enable a different—and ultimately more productive—public discourse about austerity.

Watch the full presentation of Innovation and Austerity below and visit our Geoff Mulgan series page for more on his tour.

One of my least favourite school exercises (and this is a crowded field) was returning to the classroom after summer vacation and being asked by my teacher to write an essay on “My Holiday”. The pain of sitting behind a desk, and contemplating the Math and Latin lessons to follow, whilst remembering the times of freedom just passed, was almost too much to bear. My commitment to the literary exercise was perfunctory.

I hope that the same mood of reflective disappointment was not evident in my recent “Postcard from Canada”. The great benefit of the trip was that the ideas I was exposed to on social finance innovation continue to resonate now I’m back at CSI. Perhaps that’s the good thing about a ‘thought holiday’. And, better still, the signs of movement I saw across the Pacific seem to be gathering momentum.

I was in Canada as a guest of the Federal government agency, Human Resources and Skills Development and the Public Policy Forum. The keynote speech I gave in Ottawa, “What Governments Can Do to Promote Social Finance and Innovation”, is now available at our website as an annotated Powerpoint.

As I noted in my Postcard, I was afforded the opportunity to enjoy a working dinner with the Federal Human Resources Minister, Diane Finley. It was clear from that meeting that she was well-informed and exceptionally interested in the opportunities to facilitate private capital to achieve social outcomes that could create public savings. Already familiar with the expanding trial of Social Impact Bonds in England, she was keen to find out more about the proposed demonstration project of Social Benefit Bonds in NSW. On that, from my position as Chair of the Social Investment Expert Advisory Group, I will blog more in the near future.

Today’s key message is that Minister Finley has now announced that the Canadian government led by Prime Minister Stephen Harper “can’t do everything” to meet the nation’s social challenges and “is looking at the corporate and not-for-profit sectors to help deliver more services and tangible results”.

At a major Conservative party meeting held last weekend in Ottawa, Finley argued that whilst governments can’t satisfactorily address the growing public expenditure dilemmas on their own they can increasingly “facilitate and empower others to deal with social challenges”.

A key part of that agenda, she suggested, was consideration of social impact bonds as a negotiated contractual arrangement between government, social enterprise and private investors to provide upfront capital to finance the delivery of beneficial social outcomes. The speech received coast-to-coast coverage in Canadian newspapers, from the Globe and Mail to the Vancouver Sun.

Meanwhile, as I noted in my Postcard, I’d been given the opportunity to talk to public servants in the Provincial government of Ontario about the challenges of facilitating social innovation. The Report of the Commission on the Reform of Ontario’s Public Services has now been released.

The Commission’s Report is no-holds-barred, its frankness reflecting the scale of Ontario’s deteriorating economic situation and its declining manufacturing sector. The Province now has the largest deficit relative to GDP of any province (35%) and if no changes were made to government outlays net debt is estimated to increase to C$411 billion (51%) by 2017-18.

It is within this context of austerity that Chapter 8 of the Report, on “Social Programs”, moots the idea of trialling social impact bonds, with the private bondholder receiving a risk-adjusted rate of return from the government based on the extent of public benefits received.

Clearly, in Canada as in Australia, there is increasing willingness to contemplate governments harnessing the creation of a pool of private finance for social impact. The tone of the political discussion has greater urgency. Is all this good news?

There is a clear and evident danger, as one reads government reports and Ministerial speeches that the benefits of government facilitation of social finance can be presented from a narrow perspective. Social impact bonds, for example, do allow governments to transfer risk to the private and not-for-profit sectors, ensure payment is only made on the basis of agreed and measured outcomes and reduce pressures on public expenditure in areas such as prisoner incarceration, out-of-family childcare, social housing or disability care.

These represent real benefits to governments facing pressure to balance their budgets. If that, however, was all there was to say in favour of Social Impact Bonds I wouldn’t be an advocate. From my perspective Bonds are also powerful because they allow social enterprises to grow to scale by attracting socially responsible investment. They provide encouragement to mission-driven organisations to innovate in the delivery of public benefit without being subjected to a burden of bureaucratic red tape. They require governments to audit and measure far more accurately the full social returns on public investment. The negotiation of Bond issuance demands much greater cross-sectoral collaboration and repositions government as a facilitator of reform in which the social enterprise is empowered to co-produce government policy.

The fierce public debate in the UK on the Big Society initiatives are revealing. Sceptics are understandably suspicious that social finance (generally) and Bonds (specifically) are just a smoke-and-mirrors subterfuge to cut public services or reduce expenditure. Minister Finley’s speech sought to reassure: “We’re not relinquishing any of our responsibilities. What we are doing is creating more space and more freedom.” In NSW Treasurer Mike Baird has made similar commitments. But, as so often in public policy, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating.

My own view is that governments need to make haste but slowly. Demonstration projects are vital both to assess the technical complexities of social funding and its political consequences. We need to do but learn from the doing. Evidence-based policy too often underpins a risk-averse approach: instead we need on occasion to take a punt, run a pilot and carefully evaluate the outcomes. It’s called innovation.

In the meantime, for those of you who want to learn more about Social Impact Bonds keep tuning in to CSI. If you haven’t already done so take a look at our research reports and blogs on social finance.

Peter Shergold is the Macquarie Group Foundation Professor at the Centre for Social Impact (CSI) at UNSW and Chancellor of the University of Western Sydney. He was the founding CEO of CSI from 2008 – 2011. 

During 20 years in the Australian Public Service, Peter scaled the heights of Australian government administration. For five years from February 2003, he was Australia’s most senior public administrator, serving as Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. 

Peter is actively involved in the non-profit sector and serves on the board of the National Centre of Indigenous Excellence and chairs the National Centre for Vocational Education Research.

One of Frances’ many insights is that “social innovation is not a fixed address.” This means that when one social innovation is adopted, it will shift the existing equilibrium governing the system it interacts with. Therefore, because of the way a social innovation meets one need, it might simultaneously surface and engender other needs that require yet more social innovation.

A favourite New Yorker cartoon comes to mind: Two cave people, a mother and her son, are standing in front of their cave home. The son, using primitive cave tools, is proudly putting the finishing touches on his new invention, the wheel, when the mother says, “Not without inventing a helmet, you don’t!”

Frances’ cautionary observation that social innovation isn’t a fixed address came back to me recently as I was reading about all the welcome excitement generated by educational reform.

There are a growing number of highly positive, socially innovative examples of leveraging Internet technologies for the new, emerging education agenda.

For instance, MacArthur Fellow Daphne Koller at Stanford is working with colleagues to create a new educational offering with free online learning, to give students worldwide a chance to experience “what a Stanford student gets.” According to Bloomberg Businessweek, “[m]ore than 250,000 people in 172 countries signed up for the first three computer science offerings.” Koller adds, “There are millions of people around the world who will never have access to this quality of education. Let’s put the content out there.”

Another compelling example is in the field of autism. The parents of children with autism are heralding new apps for iPads which have created opportunities for their kids to learn as never before. The BBC recently asked, “Are apps the key to revolutionising autism learning?”

But might these new pathways also trigger curve balls that need to be addressed to keep the pattern of positive outcomes moving forward? For example, does the hard technology of computer-based educational innovations have drawbacks?

Writing a blog for Harvard Business Review entitled “Digital Natives Are Slow to Pick Up Nonverbal Cues”, John K. Mullen points to the growing body of scientific literature debating electronic technology’s impact on how young people develop cognitive skills.

Some research “suggests that excessive, long-term exposure to electronic environments is reconfiguring young people’s neural networks and possibly diminishing their ability to develop empathy, interpersonal relations, and nonverbal communication skills. One study indicates that because there’s only so much time in the day, face-to-face interaction drops by nearly 30 minutes for every hour a person spends on a computer. With more time devoted to computers and less to in-person interactions, young people may be under-stimulating and under-developing the neural pathways necessary for honing social skills. Another study shows that after long periods of time on the Internet, digital natives display poor eye contact and a reluctance to interact socially.”

Since social innovation is, as NESTA CEO Geoff Mulgan says, “social in its ends and social in its means”, it is directly tied to the patterns of humans’ social behaviours and the related cues and triggers. But as the explosion of new research, writing and reporting on all these related fields illustrates (Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow; Peter Diamandis & Steven Kotler, Abundance; Timothy D. Wilson, Redirect: The Surprising New Science of Psychological Change; Mark Earls, Herd: How to Change Mass Behaviour by Harnessing Our True Nature; Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit; David Brooks, The Social Animal) we are at the early stages in our understanding of human behaviours and psychology. That simply underlines the fact that we are also a long way away from being able to predict the behavioural impacts of new innovations or combinations of innovations that produce social innovation.

It is very exciting to see huge leaps forward in accessibility to high quality education and the possibility that those with autism can participate more fully in learning through technology, but we must also prepare for the unexpected hurdles that these positive outcomes may throw across our track.

The bottom line: social innovation opens the door to huge potential for positive impact but it is a long-term marathon – not a sprint.

Post script: If you are interested in the new knowledge on social innovation being generated by Frances Westley and her colleagues, you might want to check into their executive-style Graduate Diploma in Social Innovation. The second program starts in September 2012 on the topic of The Environment: Food Systems | Green Technologies | Urban Sustainability.

Where are you skating?

• I anticipate the unexpected — the bumps in the ice, gaping holes to avoid, gale force winds… counter-balanced with a serendipitous touch of magic which will alter the colors and fill the air with music, wrote Cairine MacDonald.
• And that means we need to go into the corners and fight for the things we believe in. Ted Jackson.

Others were more reminiscent of Joni Mitchell’s River to skate away on…

• I’ve been skating towards the intersection of voice and agency for a long time now. Shari Graydon.
• I’m skating towards oblivion. Sorry to say it but so are you. Patrick O’Neill
• So I ask you to skate with me as we accept that we don’t know where the end is but to live in hope that it is better than where we are. Allyson Hewitt
• Between the old and the new, there is a place that is a kind of nowhere-land and it is one of the most challenging places to be. It can be lonely and is full of uncertainty and tension. Cheryl Rose

60 essays now compiled in one easy-to-download format.

Visit Al Etmanski’s blog to download it today.

Ambitious public sector reform necessarily will range from new policies, to new ways of engaging with provincial and national innovation ecosystems, and to creating innovation Labs that support change makers inside government.

As John Kao says, innovation needs a home where the professional innovation discipline can enhance opportunities for new solutions to emerge as people meet, interact, experiment, ideate and prototype.

A Lab can tackle issues ranging from unemployment and social assistance through to new ways for the formal health system to synergize with the informal or natural care system. Labs are adept at developing up-stream program innovations addressing root causes of complex challenges where current expenditure remains trapped managing symptoms down-stream. Lab strategies create more engagement — and improved ongoing relationships — with the public. Labs generate new ways to attract new resources. Labs reduce the cost of how things are done.

In a context of fiscal restraint, how can a small innovation Lab:

• Make the most of its own resources by leveraging the broader innovation ecosystem?
• Best serve the needs of the public sector reform mandate by effectively embracing co-creation?

Global experience points to these next generation public sector innovation principles:

• Being vested in a co-creation approach, involving users at all stages of development
• Working in co-production with multiple partners from all sectors beyond government — business, community, the household and citizens
• Participating in, and being influenced by, the range of innovation disciplines
• Connecting into the growing networks of innovation practitioners and social entrepreneurs to share resources, promote collaboration and creativity
• Having access to dedicated and conducive physical space for the development and rapid prototyping of new ideas

Christian Bason from MindLab recognizes that ultimately “the ambition for innovation labs is that they succeed in powering the innovation ecosystem.”

Fortunately there are a growing number of global innovation experiences that Canadian jurisdictions can learn from (see a sample list of worldwide leaders below). Provinces have the opportunity to implement best practice approaches, building on others’ successes and learning from their shortcomings. Rather than simply replicating what exists, a province can lead by constructing a next generation innovation Lab where public sector innovation meets social innovation.

Modern public sector innovation units and Labs are a marked departure from past practice when government saw itself as uniquely positioned to unilaterally develop and apply knowledge to tackle a societal need in a linear, hierarchical fashion.

As today’s problems evolve from “complicated” to “complex”, the expert-led approach falls short. This shift is further accentuated by fiscal constraints that force more creative thinking about what new approaches and new resources can be combined in novel ways to achieve more ambitious outcomes.

There is a growing recognition of the role of innovation units or Labs core to:

• Perceive and articulate a common understanding of a challenge
• Creatively identify possible solutions
• Experiment, prototype, test, outreach
• Implement

The approach taken in establishing an innovation platform or Lab will determine the scale and type of innovation generated.

If a province’s goal is to create truly disruptive innovations, it needs to ensure the innovation platform’s framework is capable of going beyond mainstream adaptation and reform.

As illustrated by the In/Out Matrix, based on work by leading innovation thinkers Charles Leadbeater and Christian Bason, the range of innovations that can be developed dramatically expands by employing innovation approaches linking with partners outside the existing system.

First generation public sector innovation units, like Denmark’s inter-ministerial MindLab or RED, the research and development team within the UK’s Design Council, have become landmark pioneers.

But they also illustrate the constraints of innovation units tightly bound inside of governmental structures. They are subject to limitations on how to approach problem-solving and how flexibly they can access outside partnerships. In the case of RED, the constraints of government funding and control led its founders to seek greater autonomy by leaving the Design Council and creating the free-standing innovation hub, Participle.

As Particle explains its flexible role, “we do two things: Firstly, bring together the widespread community-level ideas and creative activity, and mix it with world-leading experts in any given field; Secondly, drive forward thoughts and actions around developing a new social settlement which can deal with the big social issues of our time.”

Learning Air Canada’s Rule: No Baggage

Large institutions like governments bring unavoidable baggage (aka “anti-innovation DNA”) to the innovation process: established rules, norms and protocols, legal directives, risk-averse accountabilities, hierarchical structure, departmental silos, and limited networks, to name a few.

As Clayton Christensen identifies in The Innovator’s Dilemma, even in the most well-meaning of structural circumstances (e.g. committed private businesses with institutional leadership, financial and human resources, etc) there are sometimes insurmountable institutional barriers to innovation.

For any provincial innovation Lab to be able to develop radical or disruptive new ways to deliver value to citizens, its design and location will be very important considerations.

What Does Radical Mean?

NESTA, the UK’s leading innovation resource on how innovation can solve the country’s major economic and social problems, describes “radical efficiency” as “all about different, better and lower cost public services. It is about innovation that delivers much better public outcomes for much lower cost. Radical efficiency is not about tweaking existing systems. Radical efficiency is about generating new perspectives on old problems to enable a genuine paradigm shift in the services on offer – and transform the user experience.”

Opportunity to Cluster Labs at the Innovative Edge of the Public Service

What are options for governments when planning how it should develop a co-production environment for its innovation Lab? Two being actively discussed in Canada include: i) exploring co-investing in a tri-sectoral Lab platform serving multiple founders rather than create its own Lab; ii) another is looking at how an inside-of-government platform could operate physically in an innovation hub outside-of-government, sharing resources and an immediate ecosystem with a non-profit innovation Lab. In the latter case, a government Lab could be both firmly an “owned” government entity and still access key resources vital to its success factors by co-locating in the more porous and innovation friendly cultural environment of an innovation hub.

Postscript: I would like to thank Al Etmanski for his feedback while developing this post as well as benefiting from the recent writings by Frances Westley and Lisa Torjman.

Innovation Labs: Global Leaders

• NESTA
• Participle UK
• MIT’s AgeLab
• Adam Kahane’s Change Lab
• MIT’s Media Lab
• Finance Innovation Lab
• Change Labs
• Helsinki Design Lab
• Harvard Innovation Lab
• SlowLab
• Ezio Manzini – DESIS
• Sustainable Food Lab
• InWithFor
• Family by Family
• Stanford-D-School
• Social Innovation Lab for Kent
• The Insight Labs
• Forum of the Future
• MindLab

Short Bibliography:

1. Radical Efficiency: Different, better, lower cost public services (NESTA Research Paper) by Sarah Gillinson, Matthew Horne, Peter Baeck (2010)
2. Together: Respecting Our Future (Discussion Paper) by BC Advisory Council on Social Entrepreneurship (November 2011)
3. Innovation Nation, by John Kao (2007)
4. Leading Public Sector Innovation: Co-creating for a Better Society by Christian Bason (2010)
5. Attacking The Recession: How Innovation Can Fight the Downturn (NESTA Discussion Paper) by Charles Leadbeater and James Meadway (December 2008)
6. The Emergence of Labs (PowerPoint) by Al Etmanski (January 2012)
7. Innovation Labs, various separate draft papers by Frances Westley (University of Waterloo’s Waterloo Institute on Social Innovation and Resilience – WISIR) and Lisa Torjman (MaRS Discovery District ), (2011-12)
8. The Innovator’s Dilemma by Clayton Christensen (1997)

As a clinical psychologist trying to support sex trade-involved homeless youth, Dr. Sean Kidd found that encouraging them to participate in artistic initiatives brought far more success than the ‘best practices’ he was trained in.

While traditional evidence-based methods were still used, getting the kids to develop and act in skits together led to a far greater level of engagement than the organization he worked for had ever achieved in 25 years, as they developed the relationships and trust that helped them discuss their problems with others.

First place in the inaugural Social Entrepreneurism in Mental Health Competition

This insight came back to him five years later, in 2009, when he started reading about social entrepreneurship and the Ashoka framework of identifying effective approaches to addressing pressing social problems. With his interest suitably piqued, he began thinking about applying the social enterprise framework to the problem of mental health equity.

It struck him that while there are a number of wonderful organizations doing great work in mental health, it’s difficult to find them and identify the factors that enable them to succeed. So he turned to the Ashoka model, using search criteria and social networks to find innovators and learn from them.

The idea flips the traditional learning model on its head – rather than have clinicians and academics identify approaches based on theory, one must go to the communities and learn from practitioners. This bottom-up approach also provides access to a number of diverse perspectives and helps people understand the specific methods that work for marginalized communities.

Anyone who’s interested in social innovation will immediately recognize the value of this approach. The area of mental health inequities is influenced by a number of social determinants. As such, there is benefit to be had in using the insights of the complexity theory, one of which holds that formulas have limited applicability in complex systems. To figure out ‘what works’ in the context of mental health, therefore, Dr. Kidd’s approach described above is more robust than the traditional means of using slide decks and training sessions.

In 2010, Dr. Kidd and his colleague, Dr. Kwame McKenzie (both at CAMH and the University of Toronto’s Department of Psychiatry), established a research project called Social Entrepreneurism in Mental Health to identify service providers in Toronto that are using social entrepreneurship models to drive innovation and transformation in addressing mental health disparities.

Using a case study process, the team of researchers selected five successful service providers and identified the five components that contributed to their effectiveness:

• The right group of people working to address the right problem, brought together by an initial, all-important catalyst
• A clearly articulated mission, careful needs assessment, finding partners and establishing a structure
• Adopting unique approaches on multiple levels
• Staying focused, remaining current and consistently exceeding expectations
• Acting as vital communities unto themselves, not just service providers for communities

This year, the organizers decided to launch a competition to identify social purpose enterprises that foster mental health equity and social inclusion. The goal was, as before, to increase the awareness of innovative models and conduct systematic research so that the team could understand, share, package and propagate effective models.

A senior selection committee chose three winners and four runners-up. The winners, examined for impact, potential for growth and innovation, were announced at a ceremony on January 18, 2012:

First: Good Foot Delivery, a personalized, environmentally-friendly courier service that employs people with developmental disabilities such as Asperger’s syndrome and autism.

Second: Clean Works, which provides competitive community-based cleaning opportunities to individuals living with severe and persistent mental illness.

Third: Rise Asset Development, which provides microfinance and mentorship to entrepreneurs who have mental health and/or addiction challenges. (Read more about Rise Asset Development.)

The other shortlisted enterprises were:

FABARNAK Restaurant and Catering
Gateway Linens
Out of This World Cafe and Espresso Bar
Parkdale Green Thumb Enterprises

According to Melissa McNeil, the Executive Director of Good Foot, this recognition means a lot to their fledgling organization. “Since we’re so new, we see this as a vote of confidence – it acknowledges that we’re helping people and creating jobs. It puts us on the map.”

SiG@MaRS played a strong role in supporting the tremendous success of this initiative (it was standing-room only), both as a mentor for the organizers, and in providing advisory support to two of the three competition winners: Good Foot and Rise Asset Development. “Allyson [Hewitt] really helped us understand what a social enterprise is, and what this field is about from the bigger picture,” said Dr. Kidd. “She also helped make crucial connections with people in the space.”

The Social Entrepreneurism in Mental Health project serves as a wonderful testament to the application of social innovation to real-world problems, and effectively applies the framework of social entrepreneurship to health care. As the enterprises flourish, they will foster social inclusion and address disparities in mental health. The research, in turn, will enable caregivers and service providers to deliver better services to marginalized communities.

Social finance, also known as impact investing or blended value investing, is defined as proactively investing in businesses, organizations or funds that generate both a social or environmental AND financial return.

The Task Force on Social Finance was conceived by SiG (Social Innovation Generation), a national partnership of organizations focused on understanding, catalyzing and implementing transformative social innovation.

Over the past three years, the SiG team – having identified social finance as a critical and timely lever to accelerate innovation – has worked with partners nationally and internationally to conduct the background research for the Task Force and monitor developments at home and abroad.

The goal of the Task Force was to map and highlight examples of social finance already working internationally and across the country, identify opportunities for scaling effective models and share those case studies more broadly. This research was then used to develop a suite of seven evidence-based, catalytic recommendations for mobilizing new sources of capital, creating a supportive tax and regulatory environment, and building a pipeline of investment-ready social enterprises. Over time, action on these recommendations could help build a truly robust impact investing marketplace in Canada.

Most of all, the Task Force members hoped to raise awareness of the rapidly emerging field of social finance and stimulate a national conversation about the opportunity it represents for Canada.

Today, the economic, social and environmental imperatives to continue this exploration are as compelling as ever. These challenging times demand new thinking from all of us. Canada will need to capitalize on the talent and creativity of all its citizens to prosper in the years ahead. Broadly defined, social enterprises are a rapidly growing and critically important part of our innovation economy, developing new approaches to tackling complex 21^st century problems. They increasingly rely on private investor support to expand their programs and scale their impact.

With continuing global instability, there is growing interest in investment approaches that look beyond pure financial returns and also take environmental and social impacts into consideration. These approaches require new partnerships between governments, businesses and communities.

Over the past year, social finance has found its way into the government lexicon, positioned in the Canadian federal budget announcement as a strategic leverage point for supporting government / community partnerships, developing innovative ways to address local challenges, and creating economic and social prosperity. Provincial initiatives are similarly forging new collaborations and encouraging joint initiatives.

Foundations have stepped up to do their part in line with the first recommendation from the Task Force report, which called for Canada’s public and private foundations to invest at least 10% of their capital in mission-related investments (MRI) by 2020. There has been over $50 million of new MRI capital committed in 2011, and we send a hat-tip to the Edmonton Community Foundation for their 10% commitment to MRI and individual allocation of $27.5 million this year. Pioneering groups of non-profit leaders are harnessing community capital through unique investment tools and community bond products, driving program growth and organizational capacity.

The financial and business sectors remain under pressure and are understandably preoccupied by international challenges. Clearly, deeper participation from private sector leaders is critical to developing a healthy social finance marketplace, and we welcome recent efforts to evaluate these opportunities.

While big policy shifts take time, we have to be both patient and impatient–always a challenging balance to strike. However, the intense interest and deep level of engagement across major sector axes, from the foundation sector and governments to the community sector, is encouraging.

In a recent JP Morgan report entitled Counter(Imp)acting Austerity, the authors write: “Canada is now following in Britain’s footsteps at a fast pace, with the Canadian Task Force having recommended in December 2010 that the federal government establish the Canada Impact Investment Fund and that provincial governments should follow suit. If the Canadian experience follows that of the UK after the Social Investment Task Force, then we may see significant sponsorship of the impact investment market evolve over the coming years.”

This week we reflect on recent developments in social finance relevant to the recommendations of the Task Force. On Tuesday night we heard from Antony Bugg-Levine, recognized thought leader and CEO of the US-based Nonprofit Finance Fund, about opportunities to propel impact investing to greater heights. On Wednesday we got our hands dirty at the Social Finance Forum: Investing in Good Deals Conference.

The new MaRS Centre for Impact Investing presented the Forum – we are proud to officially launch the Centre with founding support from the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation and TMX Group Inc. The Centre will directly pursue the important task of actually mobilizing capital in new products and supporting others doing so, which is essential to rallying the commitment of more (and new) investors in this marketplace.

We look forward to continuing our collaboration with the international impact investment community, sharing what we learn and exploring opportunities to stimulate both conversation and action in the coming year. We firmly believe that private capital has an important role to play in advancing public good. The collapse of the world’s financial system has highlighted what happens when these levers are misaligned.

Impact investing is not simple. It requires a new way of thinking and of doing business – with the public and private sector working together on building true shared value for the long haul. This is the essence of sustainable innovation, and both Canada and the world need more of it.

I would like to thank the Task Force members, Tim Draimin and the SiG team, as well as the many partners across Canada who have worked so hard to advance social finance over the past year. We look forward to the next installment of this adventure in the year ahead.

Together: Respecting the Future is now on-line. http://socialinnovationbc.ca/

You can access and comment on the draft report using Google Docs. To download a full copy of the Draft Recommendations click here.

This draft report represents the current thinking of members of the BC Government’s Advisory Council on Social Entrepreneurship on how best to address our province’s tough social challenges now and in the future.  We have chosen Bill Reid’s Spirit Canoe as our enabling metaphor.  This mythical canoe which is on the back of every twenty dollar bill holds a variety of diverse occupants, not always in harmony, who have to work together to navigate the challenges of their environment.

Here is an excerpt from the opening paragraph:

We are convinced that status quo responses to complex social issues are neither sustainable nor responsible. We believe that transformative change is necessary, but also recognize that there are no simple solutions. We are not experts; however, we have been exploring the nature of the challenges we face and the possibilities for addressing them together. Now it is time to share these ideas with you and invite you to be involved in this journey to discover and uncover positive ways forward.

The Advisory Council has identified three critical areas for consideration:

• Bridging across all sectors: To find solutions we require deliberate collaboration and collective actions. Let’s combine our problem-solving abilities with discipline and intentionality and make sure our diverse perspectives, skills, resources and experience come together on shared projects. The onus cannot simply be on one sector or one group to figure it out.

• Using money wisely: Let’s get serious about funding social innovation, diversifying our revenue sources and leveraging existing resources to find, implement and spread ground-breaking solutions. We need to attract new funds to scale up proven solutions, and to develop more robust systems to measure the effectiveness of our solutions.

• Engaging everyone: Let’s encourage all British Columbians to contribute their best ideas and then support them to test, prove, implement and spread the most promising ones. Local knowledge and individual ingenuity among young and old is the “x” factor. Let’s usher in a renaissance of problem solving across the generations to eliminate our toughest challenges, prevent them from happening again so we can attend to new and emerging ones

The website also offers a Resource Section plus a Primer on Social Innovation prepared by James Tansey a member of the Advisory Council.

Your comments are most welcome and will be considered for the final draft which is due March 31st, 2012.

200 Japanese pensioners volunteered to begin the cleanup of the Fukushima power plant earlier this year. The self-proclaimed ‘Skilled Veterans Corp,’ asserted that they, not younger people, should risk radiation because, “they are more likely to die of natural causes before the cancers take hold.”

This example jumped out as a loving illustration of future thinking in, Future Quotient, a report just released by Volans a leading UK consultancy, think tank and innovation lab and JWT. Authored by John Elkington, Alastair Morton and Charmian Love (a talented young Canadian many of us hope to some day lure back to Canada), Future Quotient is designed to stimulate thinking in advance of of the 2012′s UN Summit on Sustainable Development in Rio.

The report’s implications are broader.
It offers a thoughtful analysis for those wanting to ensure our current interest in social innovation doesn’t just rearrange the chairs on the Titanic but instead helps correct its course. Or for those wanting to improve the legacy we are leaving to our future generations.

Here is their juxtaposition of present versus future thinking.

Present Thinking: A team or organisation dominated by present thinking will tend to evolve a cultural time frame that is near-term. They will focus on current trends driving the present towards a predetermined or desired goal. They will be highly organised, with changes in plans seen as disruptions to continuity, the end game of present thinkers. The future is not something to be explored and exploited; it is something to be navigated. Present thinkers try to get the job done, on time and on budget.

Future Thinking: A team or organization weighted towards future thinking focuses on what’s next. They move towards areas of chaos and uncertainty where new ideas and possibilities emerge, the end game of future thinkers. Quick to change course and adapt. Highly tolerant to risk and ambiguity a future-thinking team will engage in speculation and be driven by challenges. They will pursue possibility, often with little more that their intutition to guide them.

Future Quotient includes a survey of over 4000 Volans clients (business, government, community) assessing their ability to think and act with long term horizons in mind. The consensus – thinking and acting long-term will be increasingly important.

However the overwhelming majority of respondents felt our ability to think long-term—let alone intergenerationally—is weakening. With very few exceptions, leaders, decision-makers and policy-makers are not yet thinking and acting for the longer term. Indeed, stressed by the protracted downturn, too often they are hunkering down, lowering their ambitions and shrinking their timescales.

Rather than simply diagnose the report also inspires.

So do we trust to luck and allow a new economy to emerge wherever it chooses to do so, or do we seize the opportunity to create and shape the new order? In The Future Quotient we choose the second option. Now, more than ever, it is time for businesses and their brands, governments and civil society organizations to test and build their capacity to meet the needs of both present and future generations.

It offers 50 examples of individuals or initiatives who have a high future quotient and are invested in serious long term innovation. They include initiatives like the Clock of the Long Now (a clock buried deep in a Texas mountain and designed to run for 10,000 years. It is meant to shift our relationship with time from chronos to kairos); individuals like James Lovelock originator of the Gaia Theory (the earth as a whole is a self regulating system)) and political movements like the Arab Spring (liberating new energies that could be devoted to democracy and sustainability.)

They challenge. For example, in a section entitled Green the Greys they suggest: “Older people, in addition to being politically active and more conservative, also tend to have their pensions invested in incumbent, older order industries and companies.”

They educate – offering a guide to expanding your future quotient.

And they take hope from political leaders like Ontario Premier Dalton McGinty: The responsibility of leadership is to represent the future to the present.

For anyone interested in playing long this report offers practical first steps. A journey that can only begin with love.

Resource:

Click here for a recent SIG sponsored webinar with Charmian Love co-author of Future Quotient and Toronto based Tony Pigott CEO of JWT and key contributor to the report. It’s available for download or playback.