Bonnie Chiu, Managing Director, TSIC
More than a decade ago, I ventured into social entrepreneurship through different competitions, which were focused on supporting students to create new, world-changing ideas. I did come up with one – empowering marginalised women and girls to have a voice, a base of strength and a source of income, through photography, and have been fortunate to win many awards over the years. But over that journey, I’ve also come to wonder: why is it so easy to find awards and funding for the start of a social innovation journey, and so difficult to find support to sustain, grow, or scale that journey? Does the system actually want to keep these amazing ideas small, so that they never have enough oxygen to supplant the status quo?
Meanwhile, The Social Investment Consultancy (TSIC), where I now work, has won maybe one award. The work is not shiny, it’s about building capacity of other organisations to create more impact, and evaluating what works. Yet, I wouldn’t say the work is less ‘valuable’, even though it hasn’t received many awards. Simply, the sector does not give prizes for backbone infrastructure. Why? Why are we so focused on early stage ideas attached to specific issues, and not pay attention to the plumbing of the system?
And with my evaluator hat on, what about the countless ideas that didn’t make it to the top? When I was working on my photography storytelling idea, I submitted to over 50 competitions and won a handful. Isn’t it a huge sector-level waste, for all these great ideas not come to fruition, when we are all compelled by a sense of urgency to solve all the social and environmental challenges in the world? Why adopt the traditional form of competition, in the very first place, that misses out on many other great ideas and that does not incentivise collective impact?
I asked these three questions on a LinkedIn post, and received great feedback, that I attempt to summarise below to ultimately explore how our sector can better support social innovation and create systems change.
- Redefining what ‘innovation’ actually means
“The current mindset on how business is being run based on competitions reflects how venture logic has trickled into the social sector. What would a support system look like if it truly rewarded collaboration, scale, and long-term resilience over isolated wins?” – Ainurul Rosli, British-Malaysian entrepreneur and former lecturer on social entrepreneurship
In the social impact space, we haven’t fundamentally challenged what innovation means. It shouldn’t just be about one big idea scaling from 0 to 1. The Lean Impact approach by Ann Mei Chang argues for testing, adapting, and scaling what works, rather than chasing novelty. Social entrepreneur Nancy Johnston said, “short-termism, aversion to risk and innovations in impact largely defined and framed by the tech industry are just some of the issues around defining and funding impact and innovation awards.” Nancy advocates for “more questioning and alternative perspectives and a business case for developing the new value system.”
In my experience, most of the social and environmental problems we face are actually human problems, not technological ones. We already have all the technologies needed to solve these problems, but it’s our mental models and social systems that need to evolve.
While a sector-wide redefinition of innovation may take a long time to achieve, a few people, including impact investor Audrey Selian, have suggested that ‘upcycling’ finalists (at a very minimum) can already hold a lot of value in enabling more innovation to come to fruition.
2. Truly embracing collaboration and rejecting the competitive logic by default
The competition logic gears people to protecting their innovation rather than building their ideas in the open. Sarah Hughes, a “copilot for changemarkers” said, “ we’ve forgotten to really spell out the beauty of replication as a path to (collective) scale. Funders and investors could see the 10X return if we all embrace a more open model.” Having started my social entrepreneurship journey through winning competitions, it took me a while to ‘unlearn’ this competitive logic, and truly leaning into collaboration. Learning about systems change models, during a retreat for social entrepreneurs with Changemaker XChange, was a gamechanger for me.
There are already initiatives underway to enable collective impact: Tris Lumley from NPC has been working on Open for All, which aims to enable the social sector to share its knowledge, research, insight, evidence and data in the Commons, for the benefit of all; and Jennifer Marzullo has launched the Impact Licensing Studio to encourage adaptation of existing technologies, especially in lower and middle income countries.
But collective impact may still be hamstrung by traditional funding models, which prioritise specific ‘projects’, and sector norms. Particularly, as impact investor Julianne Zimmermann pointed out, “the pernicious effects of unexamined preconceptions like “picking the winners”, “rugged individualism”, and “the self-made success”; not to mention the lone genius / hero myth.”
3. Celebrating the less glamorous, plumbing of the system
To truly shift systems, in the words of systems change practitioner Megan Hastings, “the scaffolding and infrastructure that takes patience and can’t be tackled by any one great idea or product – this is the fabric that determines whether the larger ecosystem / community functions.” This is the plumbing that I talk about – and the work is largely invisible when the sector is functioning.
How do we get more resources channeled to infrastructure, when there’s not a neat story to tell? Over the past few years, I see more focus on this topic, in the form of funding networks and movements – but these are still largely specific to theme or places.
One of the barriers were cited by Jennifer Marzullo from Impact Licensing Studio: “there is cultural bias – even the language conjures negative connotations. Like the shared services that get treated as a cost centre, reducing needed coordination and support for capacity as “transaction costs”, as opposed to the so-called real work.” Another barrier mentioned by Jennifer is the lack of skills to understand what good infrastructure looks like, “It requires a deeper understanding of the landscape and ecosystem and a different type of operating mentality.”
There is no easy answer to addressing these barriers, and certainly we shouldn’t hold another competition for the best infrastructure organisation for the social impact space. The answers lie in having bold funders dedicated to funding the plumbing of social change for the long-term, and to supporting collective scale, not just individual winners.
Until we redefine innovation, rewire our competitive logic, and resource the plumbing of the system, we will keep reinventing the wheel, and leave a lot of impact on the table.