How to achieve sustainable results

This week's articles focuses on different approaches that social ventures can use to address social problems. While Paul Bloom highlights in the article "How to Take a Social Venture to Scale" seven organizational capabilities including the importance of your staff and communication, the authors Sally Osberg and Roger Martin believe that two main features are crucial to achieve sustainability (and profitability perhaps): the economics actors involved and the enabling technology applied.

I found the article "Two keys to Sustainable Social Enterprise" very interesting because it focuses on developing social and economic means of a disadvantaged segment. I think that addressing the root of the problem has much more impact than finding short-term solutions. During class last week, we saw a video on the "Super MoneyMaker Pressure Pump", a product that helps farmers irrigate their crops. The product is very efficient and effective but the company encountered some problems selling the product for different reasons including lack of trust, source of jealousy etc. I was shocked to hear in the video that the company manufactures these objects in China. I then understood that it was due to resources, and that one can find steel more easily in China. I believe that the company would have had much more impact if they had find a way to partially manufacture the object in Kenya for example, which would have created employment and other benefits. The company selling these pumps has introduced a new technology in Kenya but it hasn't involved the locals in the process. Going back to the article, the authors Osberg and Martin give the example of the organization Proximity in Myanmar which sold irrigation pumps but also offered microcredit services enabling the farmers the means to buy the pumps (as well as advisory support and technical assistance). Furthermore, the organization also reached out to the government to work together on the issues of food security. This example shows how the organization has made an extra step to achieve sustainability.



"How to take a Social Venture to Scale" by Paul Bloom
http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/06/how_to_take_a_social_venture_t.html


"Two keys to Sustainable Social Entreprise" by Sally Osberg and Roger Martin
https://hbr.org/2015/05/two-keys-to-sustainable-social-enterprise


(video) Fighting Poverty in Kenya by Selling Water Pumps to Poor Farmers (PBS Newshour, July 13 2010)