Every Friday, I try to remember how to multiply and divide 2-digit numbers as 9-to-11 year olds at St. Nicholas Primary School show off their math prowess.  Technically, I’m there to tutor them, but often they’re the ones teaching me.  Last Friday was no different:  with 15 minutes left, I walked over to David, a 10-year old math whiz.  Sensing his boredom, I asked him a classic question:  “What do you want to be when you grow up?”  He responded with “A scientist – probably an astronomer.”  And then, he took me to school.

“You know, outer space is like a big spikey ball that keeps on getting bigger,” he said.  I was stunned by his image of an expanding universe.  David proceeded to talk about the origin of black holes and the relationship between time and space.  He then discussed the big bang, conceptualized the possibility of multiple universes, and described “infinity.”  Up until that point, I knew David as the kid who kept talking as we took attendance at the start of each session, but in 15 minutes, he had dropped enough knowledge on me to make a first-year Physics undergrad take notes.

I am constantly reminded that students – many of them less than half my age – are capable of so much.  I spent the past four years at Brown University learning how to play basketball from an elementary schooler and watching 12 year-olds in Providence channel their creativity into building computer games.  Years later and halfway around the world, David gave me one of the most engaging Physics lessons of my life.  By enrolling as a student in formal institutions, what I’ve really done is become the student of other students.  I’ve been lucky to learn from people with unique interests and insights, backgrounds and experiences ready to apply their knowledge to shaping the world.

It is this observation – that students can use their talents to break down barriers and change the world – that has driven the development of Coursolve.  Coursolve is a platform that connects organizations with courses to empower students to solve real-world problems.  Over the past few months, I’ve been fortunate to work with some of my closest friends to explore how a wide range of students, learning both online and offline, can meaningfully contribute to solving hard problems. 

A key partner in this exploration has been Professor Michael Lenox of the University of Virginia’s Darden School of Business.  As a part of his recent massively open online course (MOOC) on business strategy, Professor Lenox invited small enterprises, nonprofits and other organizations to join the course and solicit students to provide strategic analysis and insights as a part of their final projects.

We’ve been inspired by the results so far.  For entrepreneurs like Rajan, who solicited the help of students to significantly alter the course of his biotech startup’s business development, accessing insights from a diverse body of learners was game-changing.  But Rajan wasn’t alone.  Rebecca, co-founder of the Food Recovery Network, discussed the value students added by asking fundamental questions that challenged her existing business assumptions.  Ashutosh, the founder of a not-for-profit online language learning organization, mentioned how guidance he received from one student could help his initiative become financially sustainable. 

Over 100 organizations received, on average, about 4 final strategic analyses each.  Out of over 1,000 survey respondents that identified as part of an “organization”, 60% said they would want to work with students to address their challenges in the future. 87% felt that what they received from the course was worth their time and effort (most organizations – 55% – spent only 2-5 hours per week).  Moreover, over 80% of the respondents felt that people outside of their organizations could provide valuable advice on business challenges.  As for students, over 85% of the survey respondents left feeling confident in their abilities to help businesses address their strategic challenges, and 88% said that having real-world problem solving in future courses was important to them.

These results have given us immense hope for what the future holds.  Our latest partnership is with Professor Bill Howe’s Introduction to Data Science MOOC, where students will have an opportunity to help a wide range of organizations answer important questions by analyzing internal or public datasets.  The 8-week long course started on May 1^st, and already, we’ve seen research firms, environmental advocacy groups, and small community organizations post projects.  Since we are especially excited about what students in these settings have to offer, Coursolve is also working directly with course participants to gain insights into how we can improve our social media strategy. 

As Coursolve develops over the next few months with new partnerships and a more robust platform, it will continue to help enable students with different cultural backgrounds, academic interests, and life experiences learn by directly engaging with some of the toughest problems of our time.  If we help open doors to smart people around the world, there’s no telling who will step through —and what they will accomplish.  Who knows, some of them might even teach us a thing or two about the universe. 

Many of us who work in the civic arena – that wonderful yet perplexing place where the public, private, philanthropic and nonprofit worlds intersect – are frustrated by the lack of innovation that results in sustained positive change. While the pace of innovation is driving unprecedented change in the private sector – including communications, finance and even how we eat -- not enough has changed in how communities address education, economic, environmental or public health challenges and opportunities. The lack of innovation means homelessness rates are relatively stable, education performance lags and public health challenges alone threaten to crush our economy as every dollar spent treating a preventable chronic disease is a dollar not invested in our future.

If we are to accelerate the pace of innovation and increase our ability to sustain positive civic change we should focus on three simple lessons that have been observed for decades by a wide variety of practitioners yet are rarely put into practice.

1. Recognize that we work in complex environments and develop tools specifically for such environments.

It should be clear – five decades after the launch of the war on poverty – that innovation in the civic arena requires different tools, skills and frameworks than what works in the private sector. Yet – partly because there is so much innovation occurring in the private sector – we continue to use tools designed for the complicated environments of the private sector in our much more complex civic environments.

Writers as diverse as Aldo Leopold and Margaret Wheatley have been advising us for decades on how to recognize and function in complex environments – where solutions emerge based on the interactions of independent agents, and no one is in charge. Yet, we continue to rely on “blue ribbon panels” to develop and impose solutions in complex environments. And we continue to blame the failure of such solutions on parochialism and turf protection by the actors, rather than acknowledging that the design of the solution itself was flawed. Instead of spending precious resources designing technical solutions we need to put more effort into helping the independent agents to design new rules of interactions that will enable more efficient, effective solutions to emerge. We call those interactions “collaboration.” The latest essay from John Kania and Mark Kramer of FSG in their popular “Collective Impact” series highlights the critical need to recognize and honor the role of complexity and emergence in the civic sector.

2. Effective collaborations within complex environments depend on the rules of interactions among the actors.

We make the mistake of associating collaboration with informality. Just because collaborations don’t have a traditional org chart doesn’t mean there aren’t rules of behavior that govern the interactions among the independent actors. Just as the complex natural environment has rules that guide the interactions of the birds, mammals, insects and land – as Leopold observed – so do complex civic environments. We ignore those rules of interaction at our peril; one of the most important is that we prefer to interact with those we trust. Since the quality of the emergent solution reflects the quality of interactions among the independent actors, it is critical that those interactions not be poisoned by a lack of trust and misunderstanding. Of a collaboration I’ve been involved with for nearly a decade that has struggled to live up to its promise, a participant wisely observed recently: “It’s never been designed to build trust.”

Liz Weaver and Paul Born of the Tamarack Institute articulate clearly the need for well-designed and well-governed collaborations to achieve sustained positive change.

3. Data should guide the resource allocation and actions of our collaborations.

Relying on emergent solutions to drive innovation poses inherent challenges to those who work in the civic arena. First, we are accustomed to working on solutions that have predetermined outcomes (this is often required to secure the grant dollars or the public dollars needed to implement). By definition, emergent solutions don’t have predetermined outcomes and therefore entail at least a modest leap of faith. Also, many solutions will emerge from a well-designed collaboration of civic actors. Which possible solution should we choose? Relevant data can help us address both challenges. Measuring the results of the emergent solutions at all levels – including the level of trust built among the collaborators – helps us understand whether we are moving forward or spinning our wheels. And if we wisely choose what we measure we will select only those emergent solutions that help us move those measures.

I use the term data with caution -- as the wise philosopher Neil Young said, “Numbers add up to nothing;” and numbers alone won’t inform decision making. Quantitative and qualitative data should be woven together into a narrative that influences the resource allocations and actions of the actors within the complex environment. The Strive Partnership in Greater Cincinnati uses data to influence both programmatic and community-wide progress on specific education goals.

Big Data is driving innovation in the private sector, and we in the civic sector need to embrace it as well. Data can act as the “north star” for keeping collaborations focused on creating shared value and sustaining positive change.

As Michael Porter has said, “Innovation is the central issue in economic prosperity.” And the only way we are going to create more vibrant, opportunity-rich communities for the people we care about is to develop the tools, rules and data needed bring more innovation to the civic environment.

Who Are My Heroes? Young Millennial Leaders  
 

Finding Love in the Workplace - Really!

1. Dorie Clark's What's Your Leadership Narrative?
2. Tanveer Naseer's It's Time We Develop a New Relationship with Work
3. How to Stay Relevant and Have Impact
4. Jessica Esch's It's Obvious
5. Chana Scofield's Planting SEEED's of Innovation

Chana Scofield ('22) & Gladys Ndagire ('14) ~ Sayles Hall, Brown University

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While the entire SEEED Conference (Social Enterprise Ecosystem Economic Development) was interesting and enlightening, by far I found the panel “Core Elements for Building a Social Enterprise Ecosystem” the most intriguing. The varying beliefs and experiences of the panelists were highly educational and made the experience all together enjoyable. Dan MacCombie, co-founder of Runa, in particular, cut down to the basic fundamentals of social entrepreneurship by stating the devotion his company had for their cause. There was also discussion over funding for these enterprises, and finding the balance over providing funding for a company based on their cause or the structure of the company. Overall the points were fairly addressed, even with the occasional run-on answer. The metrics of social enterprises were discussed, the overall topic discussion ending when Dan pointed out that the best way to communicate a social enterprise's success and outcomes are (for now) a good story.

Interestingly enough, I pulled more information from that hour and a half panel then I would have from any given day at school. I now have a good enough idea of social enterprises that I feel comfortable weighing in on a conversation or offering up my thoughts. I do believe that funding social enterprises can be extremely difficult. On one hand, an investor doesn't want to invest in a company whose cause they don't believe in. On the other hand, it can be risky to invest in a social enterprise whose company is doomed to fail or doesn't have a stable enough business plan to succeed. It can be very difficult to find that silver lining, especially when the companies are interested in convincing you to invest, and not providing a complete image of how their enterprise actually runs. There is also the fact that in a social enterprise the focus is on the cause, not on pleasing investors. Those who have invested may not receive dividends since this money will most likely be redistributed into the company. For this reason many investors choose to distribute their money into a regularly functioning enterprise versus a social one.

These reasons are why I believe that Allen Kramer and Gladys Ndagire, plus their team, have created something special. What they have created is a $50 Million investment fund whose focus is solely on social enterprises, the New England Impact Capital. They are set to create a list of criteria to help to help them decide which companies to invest in. Seeing the amount of trouble investors have when it comes to social enterprises, this venture capital will benefit both the investor and the company by choosing social businesses whose causes are just and promises a return on investments similar to the average venture capital firm.

The SEEED Conference had given me an understanding of the importance of social enterprises, as well as the difficulties that come when choosing to invest in them. I think it is important for the investor to have full faith in the company and it's cause, as well as the enterprise's stability and business plan. This is why an investment fund based solely on social enterprises like the one Allen and Gladys are creating is not only an exceptional idea, but would provide support for budding social enterprises as well as a safer way to invest.