Cross-pollination for problem solving

As the social entrepreneurship space expands, the role of the public and private sector responsibilities continue to change. While much funding of social impact has been traditionally supplied by the private sector, the public sector role of the White House can also play a large influence in the flow of funds for social impact. Michele Jolin’s Innovating the White House article written in 2008 highlights what federal policy should focus on, including improving access to growth capital to support efforts that are growing, providing seed capital to fund experimental startups, investing in tools to determine what is actually working, and removing any outdated tax and regulatory barriers that prevent success.

 

In early of 2009, Obama created the White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, which addresses many of these areas called upon. As discussed in Laura Tyson and Jonathan Greenblatt’s article Obama’s Policy Agenda, the mission of this White House group was to deliver a promise of opportunity for all Americans by identifying and investing in innovative solutions to social challenges and working with the private sector. To help achieve this, the Social Innovation Fund was created to partner with the private sector to amplify the impact of the federal resources by making grants to social sector intermediaries, and implementing Pay for Success financing- social impact bonds in which the government would only pay out if specific goals were met.

 

Beyond this traditional means of investment oriented government funds for social impact, a recent trend shows another unique and promising approach to encouraging social innovation thinking. Tina Rosenberg’s Prizes with an eye towards the Future brings to attention the reemergence of using prizes to encourage collaborative thinking for social problems. With today’s increasingly connected cyber world, it is more possible than ever for thinkers from different cultures and background to collaborate over different fields. Rosenberg points out that the winners of the competitions often come from backgrounds vastly different and unrelated to the subject matter as an individual experienced in the area of subject matter has a higher chance of framing the problem differently. This perspective relates to an earlier topic visited in human-centered design, and how design thinking can be approached to solve social problems. In a recent lecture at CMU’s HCI Institute, Ambra Trotto, a studio director from the Swedish Interactive Institute, gave a talk of her fascination with barbarians, and how it may be related to design thinking for problem solving. She was interested in how a community of individuals with a completely different set of habits, ethics, and system of representations could disrupt the pillars that society holds to be true to question the conceptions that civilization has created. Through this, society may be able to make transformative leaps in the way problems are approached on a most fundamental level - including social ones. As cross- disciplinary approaches to problem solving become increasingly embedded into private sector work and the education system, providing a platform for this to happen in innovation for social impact can be increasingly valuable. The next step may be- how can awareness be spread so that both the public and private sectors can generate funds to help this thrive and see its potential?