Social innovators do not often apply for jobs. They are frequently driven to work in networks, create their own projects in teams, or act entrepreneurially. In the case of the Young Foundation’s position for Director of Communications & External Relations one ought to make an exception. The Young Foundation’s key mission is so close to my own commitments and background that not asking them to dance would be tantamount to spending an entire evening in a Tango salon chained to a chair. As a dancer who gives workshops on Tango as a Metaphor for Innovation and Personal Leadership that is frankly no option.
1. Prompts, inspirations and diagnoses
Like the Young Foundation I passionately believe in the possibility and necessity for entrepreneurship and business with social impact and benefit. Like them, I incessantly follow developments and opportunities in health, education and wellbeing. I recently gave a TEDx talk on the future of education in which I called for “replacing education with innovation”. Last year I published an article about “space and value based innovation”. I also shared a panel with TED speaker Nic Marks, giving a response to his Happy Planet Index on the same day as David Cameron announced that wellbeing was to be measured to steer UK government policy.
Life continues at 65 …
I’m a trend watcher / analyst and regularly write for and am a member of the editorial board of Second Sight trend magazine. A favourite topic is the changing landscape of ageing, and I am part of a think tank group researching the implications of Singularity, population changes and the future of human-machine interaction. As part of my work for Club of Amsterdam I also help set the agenda for public debate around future issues, innovations and their social impact. In a future blog I will tell the story of how the Young Foundations report of 2006 Life begins at 60 – What kind of NHS after 2008? can today be recalibrated in the context of the Quantified Self movement and its impact on self-empowered health monitoring.
Reframing the question and crafting your own answer
Much of my work over the last fifteen years has focused on leadership issues, specifically for youth and young adults. I’ve been teaching at both further and higher education, graduate and post-graduate level since 1997, specializing in media and cultural studies, globalization, entrepreneurship and communications. I seized the opportunity to contribute through publications to the debates over Intellectual Property and Traditional Knowledge communities. Most importantly, after working as team leader at the KaosPilots Netherlands in 2008/09 and co-initiating the Knowmads School for Social Entrepreneurs in Amsterdam, I branched out into Action-Learning based sustainability education. We received a phone call from a major university one day, asking us to create a course around the economic crisis. We reframed this request in terms of “what can get us out of this crisis?” We designed and ran the ground-breaking 5-months-course Sustainable Leadership & Entrepreneurship, which not only was the first of its kind but has also produced dozens of real-life student projects with clients including ID&T, Puma, and 15 restaurant. We are now the most popular course at said university and a student team recently replaced all light bulbs with LED lights in one of its campuses. Needlesss to say we’ve been using the Young Foundation’s 2010 report The Open Book of Social Innovation extensively.
2. Proposals and ideas
As a freelancer in education, innovation and new media (which I often combine into highly unusual event experiences) I have honed my ability to draft compelling stories that are picked up by the media and resonate with public discourses. Although I began my professional life over a decade ago as a researcher and research designer for UK and European public institutions (examples include Central London Learning Partnership, European Music Office, London Arts Board, National Music Council) and thus had real impact on policy making, I feel it is in my most recent project-led work that my PR skills have come into their own. Two examples stand out. One is the Augmented Reality Ecosystem event I orchestrated, and the other is the Social Innovation Safari I designed and ran with KnowledgeLand last summer.
Augmented Citizens
In 2009 I conduceted a Scenario Planning exercise for my client V2_. Upon analysing the results it was decided to hold an event, which for the first time would bring together the growing community around Augmented Reality. The target was to connect a minimum of 30 people around this niche topic, which was just about to make the transition from micro-to mega-trend. I succeeded in booking the two leading competitors in AR (Layar and Wikitude) for the event and attracted in excess of 130 attendees, finishing off with a waiting list. I deliberately did not invite any press, thus tapping into the current theory that creating a community will automatically attract interest. I was therefore unsurprised, albeit pleased, when Reuters turned up on the day and wrote about our AR workshop, which covered the areas of commercial applications of AR, sustainability, open data and storytelling. I consider it one of my greatest talents to diagnose what an institution needs, design the right combination of ‘medicinie’, run the ‘operation’, and harvest and publicise the ‘before/after’ stories emerging from the ‘treatment’. Complex stakeholder management towards multiple win-win situations is one of my greatest passions. In pursuing sustainable relationships and projects I bring a most healthy dose of humility with me. I internalized this principle during my KUBUS studies at Copenhagen Business School, which revolutionized my thinking around project and resources management. I always, always, always seek to serve purpose, not ego. I aim to work from response, not reaction. Promoting the work of others is second nature to me, as hundreds of students and dozens of clients of mine can testify.
3. Prototyping and pilots
In November 2009 I worked as an external expert for the Deutsche Telekom sponsored innovation camp Palomar 5 in Berlin. By the spring of 2010 I had become convinced that pressure cooker innovation journeys were the way forward, but that too few (if any?) initiatives targeted and brought together the over-thirties, forties, fifties and so forth. Together with KnowledgeLand think tank Director Chris Sigaloff I designed the world’s first Social Innovation Safari. With no budget I succeeded in attracting 30 Dutch and international participants of highly diverse backgrounds and ages by using a smart social media based PR strategy, which included co-creating this video. Our oldest participant was a 60-year-old Cambridge educated entrepreneur from the UK living in Czech Republic; our youngest was a 20-year-old Canadian. One was a Philips employee, another the manager of the Basque Innovation Agency. I concepted the entire look & feel of the Social Safari campaign. Next to my insistence on age diversity I also contributed the DNA value of rapid prototyping to the Social Safari. I cannot stress enough how indispensably important the piloting element in social innovation is to my thinking and my doing in this area. There must be results. Creativity is a necessary but insufficient condition for innovation. I am closely connected to MIT’s world-wide FabLab community and see potential partnerships between an organization like Young Foundation and the social innovation stories and projects emerging from viral projects such as the FabLab movement.
Never fall in love with your own ideas
The final Safari summit attracted close to a hundred people as well as media coverage. Our clients were satisfied and four out of the five real-world challenges the Safari participants worked on are ongoing today. But that doesn’t mean that we ran the perfect Social Innovation week.
4. Sustaining
We’re about to run the Safari again this year from July 17-24, and I have personally been working on upscaling, diffusing and internationalizing the concept. This time we want to attract a number of commercial clients and challenges, and we are developing the business model around the Safari to make it both sustainable and profitable. I draw a clear distinction between entrepreneurship and charity. Entrepreneurship always means creating a reasonable expectation of rewards on your and others’ investment. Social entrepreneurship and social innovation are no exceptions. For this reason I am forever prepared to re-focus or redesign projects towards sustainability even if this means letting go at times. My objective and analytical thinking skills were polished at Rotterdam Erasmus University where I pursued my second set of Master studies in Economics and Philosophy, focusing on Ethics in economic policy (including the work of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum).
5. Scaling and Diffusing
I believe the time may have come for me to bring what I dare to call my ‘modest magic’ to a wider audience. It’s time to create a bigger impact by bringing my skills and experience to an organization that has a commitment to scaling up in international settings. The ethically sourced diamond I’ve polished myself to become is looking for amplification to shine more brightly. I would relish the chance to throw light onto, help power and help promote through my work people and initiatives that drive value-based entrepreneurship throughout the world. Results run the world, but it is stories that run our minds and hearts to perceive, support and build on those results.
Curiosity Made The Cat
In 1999 when the term ‘multi-media’ was still fashionable I completed a Master degree at the HyperMedia Research Centre in London. There I learnt the enduring basics for understanding web-based communities, non-linear storytelling, virtual information management and Internet architecture. For my final project I content-designed part of StudentUK’s website. The first thing I’d attempt to further enhance the Young Foundation’s website is to give it an interactive, dynamic community feel from the first second it uploads. Looking at a quality painting is very engaging but opening a door for people arouses their curiosity and involves them. To invite people into an unknown space – even though we might discover familiar elements in it – is to involve them and make them leave their comfort zone. Visitors become pro-sumers. Let’s run the Young Foundation Archive Competition: Crowd-sourced stories like the T-shirt designs at Threadless. Let’s be open. For example, the Young Foundation’s existing and potential communities could be asked to write or make a video about OpenEverything, with the specific request to highlight the predictive and pioneering aspects of this 2008 event three years on. Which elements of the initiative have turned out to be visionary and agenda-shaping in 2011?
In the Attention Economy a highly hosted one-day-long press conference experience entitled We’ve Been Saving Our News might have more impact than the traditional press release, although the latter can benefit from degrees of rebranding. Five Reasons Why Not To Write About The Young Foundation’s DIGITAL ACTIVISM Project; or Future 100 Young Entrepreneurs – One Year On (running a micro-funding initiative with the press where people predict success and invest in projects) are just two tasters from a HeartStorm session we haven’t yet had. I would love to facilitate one so Young Foundation shall have plenty more than its currently 611 reasons to tweet. As marketing manager and moderator for the annual Creative Company Conference my team generated 600+ followers on twitter in less than two weeks. The combination of a powerful web presence, social media profiling, above-the-line storytelling and on-and offline community building can ensure that the Young Foundation’s important work is scaled up and diffused at maximum speed and scope, thus contributing to …
6 … desirable systemic change
… must be pursued.
Together, perhaps?
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