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Week 3: Social Innovation at the Meso-Level - Coggle Diagram
Week 3: Social Innovation at the Meso-Level
Part 1: Collaborating for Social Innovation
Collaboration rationale - Why collaborating?
Grand challenges are complex
: cannot be tackled by an individual or purely on the micro-level
Greater results
Social innovation relies on the collaboration of actors from different sectors
: the reluctance among important groups to collaborate will endanger/prohibit the potential success of the social innovation
Effective Collaborative forms for Social Innovation
Cross-Sector Partnerships
Formed between actors from different sectors and fields
E.g. NGOs and governmental organizations
Benefit: Ability to harness the competencies, expertise and qualities of partners
from across different sectors and fields to tackle a grand challenge
Cross-Sector fertilizations
enables social innovation through the following 3 mechanisms
1. Exchange of ideas and values between business, nonprofit and government
(enables
SRI
- Socially Responsible Investing)
2. Shifts in roles and relationships
(enables Emissions Trading as it required nonprofits, businesses, and governments to assume new roles)
3. Integration of private capital with public philanthropic support
(enabled Self-Help that pioneered the secondary market for mortgage-backed securities based on loans to low-income households)
Examples
PepsiCo - Care International: "She feeds the world" to empower women in the agricultural sector by providing training, resources and access to markets, contributing to food security and economic development
Dopper - Smart Paani Nepal: SPN builds installations to capture and filter rainwater in Kathmandu. Outside Kathmandu, they collect groundwater and filters it with biosand filters. Copper donates installations to Nepalese schools, giving students access to drinking water and offers its expertise in marketing/R&D
Failure:
75% fail to meet partner expectations
High level of conflict
Different measurements and success factors
Power dynamics, trust and communication issues
Crowdsourcing
Crowdsourcing represents the act of an organisation taking a function
once performed internally and outsourcing it
to a network of people in the form of an
open call for collaboration
The idea of crowdsourcing resembles
crowdfunding
, the act of r
aising capital directly from a large group of people bypassing traditional financing intermediaries
.
E.g:
Fairphone's
crowdfunding campaigns.
Failure: Campaigns are often biased
Part 2: Collective Impact and its Success Conditions
Collective Impact Rationale - Why?
A substantial percentage of cross-sector partnerships or collaborations in general face challenges or fail to achieve their goal
Collective Impact is one specific form of collaboration for social innovation that addresses these common challenges and pitfalls and specifies 5 key conditions for collaboration to be successful
Nonprofits, governments, businesses
5 conditions for collective impact
1. Common agenda
Requires all participants to have a
shared vision for change, agree on primary goals
, common understanding of the problem and joint approach to solving it through agreed upon actions.
2. Shared measurement style
Needed to enact a common agenda.
Measure results on the same criteria
= ensures that efforts remain aligned, enables the participants to hold each other accountable,
learn from each other (success & failure), spot pattern, find solutions, and implement them rapidly
3. Mutually reinforcing activities
The specific set of activities needs to support the actions of others. Each participant
undertakes the specific set of activities at which it excels
in a way that
supports and is coordinated with the actions of others
.
4. Continuous communication
Time to develop
trust
and a
common vocabular
y is essential (prerequisite to developing shared measurement systems)
5. Backbone support organisations
Separate organisation and staff
who plan, manage, and support the initiative through ongoing facilitation, technology and communication support, data collection and reporting, etc.
Project manager, data manager, and facilitator
Strive:
Common Agenda: Strive focused the entire educational community on a single set of goals
Shared Measurement Systems: Strive developed shared performance indicators
Mutually Reinforcing Activities: All partners aligned their efforts.
Continuous Communication: All the collective impact initiatives held monthly or even biweekly in-person meetings among the organizations’ CEO-level leaders. Skipping meetings or sending lower-level delegates was not acceptable.
Backbone Support Organizations: Strive has simplified the initial staffing requirements for a backbone organization to three roles: project manager, data manager, and facilitator.
B Corps
Common Agenda: Certified B Corporations are businesses that have a common agenda to meet the highest standards of verified social and environmental performance, public transparency, and legal accountability to balance profit and purpose.
Shared Measurement Systems: The B Impact Assessment evaluates a company's practices and outputs across five shared categories: governance, workers, community, the environment, and customers.
Mutually Reinforcing Activities: Around the world, collective action initiatives are led by Certified B Corporations with support and involvement from the global network of B Lab. For instance, a coalition of 26 leading Certified B Corporations across eight countries and three continents seek to improve the sustainability standards of the beauty industry.
Continuous Communication: Given the scale and distributed nature of B Corps, continuous communication is difficult but the European B Corp network organizes conferences, talks, training, and webinars for their members.
Backbone Support Organizations: The global network of B Lab.
Isolated Impact vs. Collective impact
Isolated Impact:
Organizations work separately and compete to produce the greatest impact independently
Large-scale impact is assumed to depend on scaling a single organization or social innovation
Evaluations attempt to measure a particular organization’s impact (‘attribution’)
Funders and investors select individual grantees that offer the most promising solutions
Collective Impact:
Impact is achieved by working toward the same goal
Large-scale impact depends on increasing collaboration amongst many organizations
Evaluations attempt to measure the contributions of many different organizations towards achieving impact (‘contribution’)
Funders and investors understand that social problems and their solutions arise from the interaction of many organizations within a larger system
Part 3: Measuring (Collective) Impact
The purpose of measuring impact
Allows organizations to
assess the effectiveness
of their social innovations, understanding what works and what doesn't to adjust and improve future initiatives.
Allows to
allocate limited resources
and avoid investing in ineffective strategies.
Regular impact measurements facilitates
continuous learning to address evolving needs
because grand challenges are complex and dynamic, change all the time
Provides
accountability and legitimacy
by demonstrating how resources are utilized and the outcomes achieved to a wider public
Key methods (Steps) and tools for measuring impact
1. Theory of Change
AKA logic model is the foundation for
what an organization does and why
it does it
Should answer
What impact do you hope to achieve?
What is the mechanism by which you achieve that impact?
How will you know when you've achieved it?
Specifies:
Inputs
Activities
Outputs
Outcomes
Impact
2. Key performance indicators (KPIs)
Organizations should determine
which metrics actually matter
based on their theory of change, focusing on those that are the broadest reaching, provide the most insight into program implementation, and define success
Should be clear who is responsible for collecting and analyzing the data for each metric, what needs to be measured and where data will be stored
Each metric should be
associated to a goal
which the org. can
measure progress over time
Make visible to internal stakeholders continuously
3. Surveys and Questionnaires
Collect
time series data
(same data point in different times)
Provide insights into which groups benefit from a program over others
Correlations
are a powerful sign that a program is either moving outcomes in the right or wring direction
5. Randomized Controlled Trials
Trial or experiment carried out on
two or more groups to
capture the impact of an intervention
where
participants are randomly assigned
to receive an intervention or not
In order to claim
causal inference
about the impact they achieve, a control group that does not benefit from the social innovation is needed to compare them with the group benefiting
Unethical
and often impossible
4. Quasi-Experiments
Can't assign randomly who receives an intervention and who doesn't
Find a
control group of people similar to the group benefiting
from the social innovation
Use your own clients and collect historical data from them
Find similar group of people who were not able to participate in a program
Debates and challenges in impact measurement
Measuring intangible outcomes
Different stakeholders perceive and interpret these outcomes differently, making it challenging to establish a universally agreed-upon measurement
Often
context-dependent
, what may be considered a positive impact in one context might not hold the same significance in another
Resist quantification
Measuring short-term vs. long-term impact
Time taken to measure impact
Attribution vs. Contribution
Imagine the following: You want to go outside for fresh air so you push the door open and go outside. You caused the door to open and the door would not have opened without you pushing it. You acted alone, so the outcome can be attributed exclusively to your intervention. Now, imagine that a friend joined you in pushing the door open. What portion of the outcome can be attributed to you and what portion contributed your friend?
“
Contribution
is the idea that
your influence is only one of many factors
that contributed to a change, while
attribution
is the idea that
your intervention
was the
only reason
for the change”
A
contribution-based approach
is particularly
useful for measuring collective impact