A hands on approach to supply and demand

A hands on approach to supply and demand

Social value is difficult to value, and over the last 40 years, there have been an array of inconsistent ways of approach. Mulgan in the Measuring Social Value article in the Stanford Innovation Review suggests that this is due to a multitude of reasons. First, social value is hard to evaluate hard because it needs to cater to multiple roles involved; accountability to external stakeholders, managing internal operations, and assessing societal impact. Ideas can be hard to translate between these three priorities. From an economic perspective, it can also be difficult to put a return metric on what the social impact would be over time, and agree upon a common desired outcome amongst all parties/stakeholders involved.

The next thing to consider is that coming up with a standard in the social sciences is very different from the approach taken in the sciences, where science is subject to physical laws. Instead, being in the social sciences realm adds a layer of complexity due to human beings’ social, psychological, and environmental forces. Mulgan offers a framework to consider the classic supply and demand theory. However, the focus is not on finding the value at where supply meets demand, but rather forging the links between supply and demand that then generates value. For instance, to make the demand side more transparent, connect the needs of the underrepresented who may not have the ability to voice their needs to the policy makers and entrepreneurs who may have the capability to scale the impact (which Mulgan called turning latent demand into effective demand). From the supply side, leaders can create innovative programs and collect evidence of what is working.

The concept of forging supply and demand resonates well in particular with the work done by Bill Strickland, a community leader from Pittsburgh and president/CEO of the non-profit Manchester Bidwell. Instead of accepting how the community would have viewed where the supply and demand met in the work he took on at the Manchester Bidwell at risk youth program he led, he worked simultaneously to increase both supply and demand by creating an arts based education program, and consistently sharing his work with the private and public sector anecdotal evidence that it was working. 

In a recent talk he gave at the Carnegie Library in a CreativeMorning breakfast series on the topic of empathy, he shared two values that has gotten him to where he is today; “If you treat people like world class citizens, they will act like world class citizens”, and “environment drives change”. In his school, he built classrooms filled with natural light and art pieces so that students could feel belonging to a world-class education. Towards the end of his speech in describing a new education center recently built in Israel where Jews and Arabs would be attending school side by side, he shared with the audience that in working with other leaders driving social impact and positive change, the one similarity to the work is a sense of spirituality in the endeavor; not in the religious sense, but rather in empathy. This intangible force is what differentiates this field and what makes it especially hard to assess any type of “value” to. I am curious if, when, and how we will ever be able to quantify this intangible and unique variable.