"...if you want to solve a molecular biology problem you ask only molecular biologists. Big mistake."

In her article in The New York Times titled "Prizes With an Eye Toward the Future" Tina Rosenburg highlights the following case study:

At Harvard Business School, Lakhani led a study of hundreds of scientific problems posted on InnoCentive. These were problems that the laboratories of science-driven companies had mostly failed to solve,  which is why they turned to InnoCentive. They found that InnoCentive’s network solved nearly 30 percent of them.

What made for success? InnoCentive asks solvers to check boxes indicating the different scientific fields that interest them. The more diverse the interests of the base of solvers, the more likely the problem was to be solved. The study also found that expertise in the field of the problem actually hurt a solver’s chances.

Rosenburg's point was to show not only the effectiveness of open, future oriented innovation prizes but also the power of unconventional perspectives and approaches in making such prizes so effective. This evidence-based observation fits well (how lucky for me!) with my concern regarding social impact bonds, or more specifically social impact bonds carried out in a certain way (my critique is more an opportunity for improvement rather than a condemnation). It is tempting to think that taking an organization or program that has been highly effective in positively changing a specific social problem and scaling it would logically create the same positive change only for more people. The very real risk is that this not only fails to account for the context in which the organization or program thrived but also creates a certain tunnel-vision. Consider this Ted Talk from Dan Pink on The Puzzle of Motivation:

What we're expecting with what I call "subject matter expert scaling" is that if Solver A can solve Problem A within Context A then Solver A squared should be able to solve Problem A squared within Context B. The math doesn't work. On a larger scale factors that create a context not only multiply, they morph. And as Rosenburg shows us, in scaling a single perspective, a single narrative, we diminish our chances of arriving at effective and innovative solutions.

So what can be done?

As I've been going through the readings, particularly this week and last, I've found myself coming back to the same question: But what about these intermediaries? They are these linchpins to new models for innovation, including social impact bonds and social innovation prizes, and yet I feel that there is so little said about them.

Well, considering the need we've already noted for self-motivated, diverse, contextually knowledgeable and trusted, and quite simply more perspectives approaching a problem, I believe those intermediaries channeling public and private funds into effective organizations and programs should be required to be all of those things. Consider The Sprout Fund, a catalytic funding organization in Pittsburgh that is on the ground and embedded in the community such that it can make connections between innovative ideas, effective organizations, and often inaccessible foundations. The White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation shouldn't just position itself as a yet another high level funder among many; it should champion (through funding support among other things) the contextualized funders and connectors like The Sprout Fund as the appropriate intermediaries for funds.

In turn, OSICP should itself be an intermediary within the government. Deregulating government agencies to be able to offer social innovation prizes and other innovation catalyzers is a great first step, but what the OSICP could do further is to connect fund intermediaries in communities with government inter-agency teams, bringing together local knowledge and support, high level expertise and resources, and most importantly diverse and ideally unconventional perspectives. Just as effective social innovation funding needs trusted intermediaries in the communities being impacted, as noted in The Economist article "Let's hear those ideas," so too does the effectiveness of this work need a trusted intermediary in government.