Social innovation in all projects!
On December 4, I had the opportunity to attend a conference on social business, held and arranged by Copenhagen Business School and WeCollaborate.org
Keynote speaker was Dr. Muhammad Yunus, the 2006 Nobel Peace Price winner.
At the conference Dr. Yunus argued through two main points, that social businesses and profit oriented businesses must co-exist:
Point 1: The wealth and progress of the world, are in many ways driven by man’s search for profit. Without it, only few of the important technological and medicinal innovations the world has seen, would have been invented. And that’s just two areas; the list goes on and on.
However, Dr. Yunus says, that kind of money focus has a serious flaw: Too strong a focus will make us forget the real important things in life, such as fighting poverty and inequality, when it’s in our power.
Point 2: In order to make the world better, as a whole, we need to have social businesses who, instead of seeking profit, find their sole purposes in the social agenda. (That is to say, the issues we as societies around the world, decide to change)
Many people have argued, as did Jeppe Thoubo (Director of Danish Industry) at the conference, that it must be possible to find a way to have both social business and money-making business in the same company. Dr. Yunus argued that profit-making businesses, will always want more profit – that’s the way our markets work and that therefore the two things should be kept apart. Whether it would be possible, remains to be thoroughly tested in action. At the conference, Managing Director of Grundfos LIFELINK, Peter Todbjerg Hansen, presented the LIFELINK-project, Grundfos’ attempt to merge social business and profit-making. It’ll be very interesting to see how it works out for them.
We at fi believe in testing whether merging the two goals is possible. Doing this kind of business combination, merging the ability and will to improve the world and ideas for making money, actually corresponds very well to a key saying of fi’s friend from the Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), Prof. Teng-Kee Tan: “Innovate with a purpose!” The idea here, corresponding with the idea of social innovation, is that there are multiple goals for any project.
Whenever we go out and participate in innovation projects, we try to realise an idea’s true potential for change and not just the economic side of it. Employee happiness, customer satisfaction, shareholder and business-to-business willingness to participate in innovative projects are more and more becoming dependent on how “good” a project feels. Thus, the socially innovative perspective of any given business project ought to be considered in the future.
