Innovation is key to shift social disadvantage

Last year(2014) a friend whom I call the goddess of Start up – Nicole Williamson – introduced me to the parallel universe of tech and start up – I was mesmerized by the innovation and the hunger for creation. I’m so grateful to Nicole for introducing me to her world and being so generous to take me along to the numerous events occurring in Sydney that foster, inspire and nurture innovation. It got me thinking how amazing it would be to apply these worlds and their methods to solve wicked social problems?

Id spent many years (almost 30)  in the vortex of policy, government, NGO and social disadvantage – getting frustrated at the seeming futility of hundreds of billions of dollars being plowed into disadvantage with little result – even worse I started to see that the return on investment (ROI) really sucked! Even worse – people’s lives are at stake and disadvantage is growing exponentially despite the investment of money, programs and attention.

Innovation is key – really, there is no other way because we have enough and we definitely can do better to protect the most vulnerable people. Solutions are really not that hard, they just require new thinking, thought leadership from across sectors and disciplines to apply their minds to these messy problems like domestic and family violence, recidivism, homelessness, disability and unemployment. Our current approaches are failing, even if some would argue that there has been some progress, its too slow and too many people are falling through the cracks.

This week, April 2015,  NSW Premier Mike Baird announced a new Ministry, most exciting for the startup and tech communities was the re-appointment of the Hon. Dominic Perrottet as Minister for Finance and Services and the new appointment of the Hon. Victor Dominello as Minister for Innovation.

Its not enough to get NSW moving without some bold moves including the lease of poles and wires to fund long overdue infrastructure and the commitment by the Premier, Brendan Lyon, CEO of Infrastructure Partnerships Australia, Tracy Howe, CEO of NCOSS and the Minister for Family and Community Services to contribute $1b to social housing. Its exciting to think of the opportunities that lie in exchange of ideas across sectors as to how we could turn that $1b into ten times more to create new solutions to social housing, shelter and homelessness

“Innovation is a hard, messy process with no shortcuts. It starts with making something that you’d like to use and that might make people’s lives better.”  Guy Kawasaki

The fact that innovation is messy makes it hard for risk averse public servants to embrace its tenets – risk, failure, courage, disruption. However there seems to be a growing appetite for innovation in the public sector like the Premiers Innovation Initiative (NSW), Transport for NSW Customer Central innovation hub Andrew Kendall showed me, the endless open data, open government initiatives by NSW Minister for Finance and Services Dominic Perrottet’s Finance and Services and  Apps4NSW and Federal Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s GovHack,

I believe having a Minister for Innovation brings all this together – its an opportunity for Minister Victor Dominello to identify and implement innovation across public sector agencies. It demonstrates a desire and necessity to innovate our responses to big problems, including wicked social problems. It will be great to have an innovation lens applied across portfolios, can you imagine the possibilities of new thinking? I can – I have been inspired by so many individuals and companies out there applying their talent to help people.

I recently met UTS Professor Hung Nguyen who is inventing amazing enabling tools such as the aviator smart wheelchair ( see Youtube Clip here), his contribution is leveraging design and technology to innovate solutions to social care including falls prevention, diabetes and more! In March 2015, Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd., Fujitsu Ireland Ltd., and Fujitsu Limited announced they have “developed a technology that uses sensors, embedded in smart houses and worn by patients, for the early detection of abnormalities in motor functions that might otherwise go unnoticed.”

“Innovation is the central issue in economic prosperity.” Michael Porter

Traditional thinking has only taken us so far in being able to reduce social exclusion, marginalization and increase opportunity for disadvantaged people. Globally we are seeing a number of innovative solutions such as the rise of social entrepreneurship, of cooperatives and mutuals and of greater emphasis on collaboration. My hero – Ben Hecht CEO of Living Cities is a constant inspiration in his vision to connect opportunity to disadvantage that is transforming lives in some of the most vulnerable people in the USA.

“We take risks, catalyze fresh thinking in order to test new approaches in order to creatively disrupt the status quo.” Living Cities

We can learn a great deal about how to emulate this to extend the $1billion anticipated for social housing in NSW and address the valid concerns of the homelessness and housing affordability sectors to ensure that we can really do something that will meet growing challenges!

So I hope that this trend continues and that we as a society continue to look outward, that we collaborate and innovate out of any problem!

Disruption4Good

disruption: dis|rup¦tion

Pronunciation: /dɪsˈrʌpʃn/

According to Oxford Dictionaries, the Definition of disruption in English:

noun Disturbance or problems which interrupt an event, activity, or process

My relationship with disruption started early – in primary school my parents received report cards with comments like “Anne-Marie is disruptive in class.” Luckily I never really took this in a bad way, you see I was disruptive because I wasn’t a sheep, I had a very different learning style which was more collaborative and learning from others than from learning by rote!

In fact if the teachers bothered to look behind the ‘disruption” they would have been able to harness this “disruptive behaviour” for good, yet they didn’t and I guess they thought this little girl would be put back in her box – that of a dutiful, compliant primary school student. They were wrong!

Although my subsequent years were spent playing the game of compliance, I never really fit in, so it came as a surprise to even me,  that some 40 years later I would own that word and claim it as a title – my twitter handle is @ChiefDisrupter and my blog disrupter4change. So my journey of disruption began with that seed in the mid to late1970s, a seed that struggled to thrive in the face of limited teachers, and limited structures but somehow this little seed decided that it would learn to thrive in these conditions. I went from “surviving” the term to living it and “thriving”.

You see in my 30 odd years of advocacy and work in disadvantage I can promise you the status quo absolutely and passionately has to be disrupted, we as individuals can no longer be complacent and wait for some miracle to happen – it won’t! My life mission, my vocation now is to spread the gospel of disrupting the status quo and innovating our responses to wicked social issues through cross sector and discipline collaboration. My mantra is collaborate or perish, disrupt or see more of the same.

So why does the word disruption have such a negative connotation? I believe the meaning has in fact evolved to be something at times necessary and positive to move forward and to innovate!

The Christensen institute explains the positive side of disruption: “The theory of disruptive innovation was first coined by Harvard professor Clayton M. Christensen…The theory explains the phenomenon by which an innovation transforms an existing market or sector by introducing simplicity, convenience, accessibility, and affordability where complication and high cost are the status quo. Initially, a disruptive innovation is formed in a niche market that may appear unattractive or inconsequential to industry incumbents, but eventually the new product or idea completely redefines the industry.”

A friend recently tagged me in post of an article in BBC News “Can Soup change the world” which highlighted a movement, in Detroit USA, generated by people to solve social dilemmas (http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31594513), a dragon’s den style where people pitch solutions to social problems – music to my ears. You see these folks aren’t waiting for government coffers to stump up the cash for good ideas, they are collectivising efforts and getting the community to sponsor the ideas – innovation is born because as you would guess it’s not the usual suspects coming up with the same old solutions.

Check out the story on BBC Can Soup Change the World 

Detroit Soup is an innovative crowd-funding dinner which is bringing people together to raise thousands of dollars for community projects in Motor City. Since it launched five years ago, it has helped launch a range of start-ups working in areas such as urban agriculture, social justice and education – projects funded by and for the people. But could this model work in other cities? For the BBC’s A Richer World season, the BBC takes Detroit Soup founder Amy Kaherl to Nepal, to start a new crowd-funding culture Kathmandu-style.

Let me know your views on Disruption anne-marie.elias@uts.edu.au or on twitter @ChiefDisrupter

Time for a new way of working

I find it incongruous we have so much wealth yet more people are falling through the cracks. For some there’s an abundance of food and water and others don’t have enough.

Would you be shocked to know we have children in Sydney going to school without food, families going hungry?

Would it shock you that we have communities living in shanty towns in the state of NSW?

Would it make any difference to know that while we waste water in some parts of the country – there are Australian communities that don’t have access to clean drinking water?

Personally I think at some stage we lost our way from being community centred to government and NGO centred. Somehow we believed that anyone outside community was the key and we saw bigger government and bigger NGOs often dislocated from the heart of the matter – community.

We stopped listening to the very people we are here to serve and only spoke to each other, we set up structures to distance community with layers of community leaders, advisers and committees between those that make decisions and the people ultimately affected by these decisions.

I think we can agree that on their own government and NGOs are not the answer  – despite enormous efforts and   investments across sectors (business, philanthropy, government, fundraising) to support vulnerable people and communities – estimated at $250 billion per year (Centre for Social Impact 2014), disadvantage is growing with 1 in 7 Australians living below the poverty line (ACOSS, 2014).

I believe 2015 will be the year of community, we need to re-engage with the people in communities – not just the leaders, we have to get over our need to have processes and structures that don’t work and move closer to understanding and collaborating with affected communities. We have to stop giving out fish and start giving out fishing lines, so communities can be the change so desperately needed.

My dream is to pull decision makers together and talk more sense than platitudes – why can’t we move the water from here to there? Why can’t we ensure that no child or family goes hungry by more effectively redistributing the food that is often thrown away? Food Bank and Oz Harvest are brilliant redistribution services but somehow they are not reaching all those that need, how do we create market gardens so people have access to fresh vegetables? How do we give families a chicken so they may have fresh eggs?  How do we facilitate these initiatives, which by the way are happening in some communities but not others?

I believe we do this by disrupting the status quo – stop whatever we are doing that isn’t working and start collaborating across sectors – if we are dead serious about social change – we have to work differently, with community at the centre and we have to start owning our failures (1 in 7 Australians below the poverty line) and start listening to the very people we are here to serve.

Anne-Marie Elias is @ChiefDisripter

of The Collective NSW a social impact model which brings together business, community, NGOs and government to collaborate on social disadvantage. To see our stories, visit The Collective NSW YouTube Channel.