Impact + Scale: Social Enterprise Design Workshops

Led by Adam White (E’09, EPIIC’08 & ’09)

Social Enterprise that Doesn’t Deliver
The Social Enterprise field is growing rapidly. More startups are being launched, more people, young and old, are becoming social entrepreneurs, more money is coming from impact investors and social enterprise accelerators. A large number of these social enterprises work to create change for the poorest people around the world--through new products and services in the developing world.

Unfortunately, though, many of these social enterprises are not delivering as promised. Impact investors aren’t seeing the returns, enterprises are not scaling, change is not happening. This problem is largely because many social enterprises are conceived of without a good understanding of the people and the communities they wish to serve. From the brilliant new android app designed for farmers who don’t own smartphones to a compact water filter that makes water clean but takes five minutes to fill a small glass of water--many innovations in the sector are out of touch with reality. These are some of the more obvious examples, most are more subtle. Investors and social entrepreneurs often do not have the tools to assess their ideas on the ground or to create new ideas that work.

The Social Enterprise community needs to design better social enterprises that understand the people and the communities they hope to serve. Impact + Scale took place this June in India as a workshop for students to investigate and research local context in order to design good, scalable, impactful social enterprises.

Impact + Scale was developed by IGL alumnus Adam White, a cofounder of Groupshot and one of the finalists in the World Bank’s Innovation contest.  Groupshot is an NGO that researches, designs, educates and advises on projects at the intersections of innovation, social entrepreneurship and global development. It works to bridge existing and informal systems with global patterns of innovation through technology, community, conditions and culture.

Impact and Scale Workshop:
A team of four Tufts students and one Fletcher School student was led by White on a month-long field workshop to investigate the design process of social enterprise. Focusing on two social enterprises – a low cost wheelchair company and a new English language education organization -- the workshop looked at ways that local context can lead social enterprises to be more relevant, more impactful, and more scalable.

Building off of last summer’s workshop in Nairobi, Kenya, which researched technology-centered projects in Kenya, this workshop aimed to engage students in action-oriented design research. Each project had a specific design objective and developed research plans in order to verify assumptions and generate insight that could lead to successful enterprise.

The top questions in the innovative social enterprise field today are about scalability and impact. Impact, not output, implies that a social enterprise needs to do more than put out a series of products or projects (outputs)–these enterprises should create real change and have tangible positive outcomes (impact) from their projects, products and services. Scale implies that the concept behind a social enterprise can grow beyond a pilot to be sustainable in different communities and regions around the world.

Context-Oriented Design Workshop
The focus of the workshop was to use context-based research to understand the systems that enable a social enterprise. The local systems are what leads a new social enterprise to succeed or fail. Too often a social enterprise is created with a very topical understanding of a local context. While this is generally more common with foreign designed projects, even projects from the same country can be just as out of touch with the users and stakeholders who are often very different from the entrepreneurs. Through the workshop’s approach, the students gained a nuanced understanding of the complex ecosystem of all stakeholders, including: service providers, governments, families, users, donors, businesses, and development professionals. By employing a contextual action research approach, the team was able to evolve assumptions and develop new context-centered concepts and strategies.

Case Study:  Leveraged Freedom Chair
Jack Miszencin (A’12)
Shirish Pokharel (A’15)
The Leveraged Freedom Chair case study was an effort in taking a technical innovation--a new type of wheelchair designed for rural areas of the developing world--and turning it into a robust, impactful enterprise with the potential to change lives in a responsible manner. MIT engineers developed the technology--the Leveraged Freedom chair, or LFC for short--that was new in its approach to generalized developing world conditions. The challenge for the team was to figure out how this idea fit into a complex, constantly changing market. How would people find out about the wheelchairs? Who would distribute them? How would the enterprise’s leaders ensure that the wheelchairs were being used as they were intended and not sold for cash once donated? Would people be willing to use these chairs at all?  And in what manner and what kind of environment?

Throughout the design research process, the work plan and questions evolved. Over the course of their work, the idea of networks emerged as a key concept. Environments, meanwhile, took on a new meaning, as it soon became apparent that the LFC is best suited for rural settings. The team then began investigating how rural users would be connected with primarily urban-based NGOs. The research took the team to places they never expected, and ultimately led them to a nuanced and diverse understanding of the problem. Work plans are ongoing but final design concepts and insight will be shared with LFC and a wider audience over the next few months.

Case Study:  SPEAC--Spoken English Assessment Certification
David Schwartz (A’13)
Elyse Voegeli (A’14)
The SPEAC case study was a different design approach for the group from the Leveraged Freedom Chair, in that they looked to develop an entirely new social enterprise targeted at teenage English language learners. Rather than start with and improve a pre-existing technology, they set out to investigate if they could instead design a highly contextual social enterprise. Through a combination of traditional, user-centered tools, though with an emphasis on gaining a complex understanding of the relationships in English language usage and acquisition, they challenged themselves to identify a new social enterprise concept.

Over time, the team channeled its research into a series of design briefs and frameworks that outlined the challenges and their intended route to a solution. By prioritizing certain skills, like spoken English, and developing broader concepts, such as an emphasis on confidence, they developed a context-centered framework to continually evaluate and identify new ideas. Likewise, they developed a base of people and other documentation to improve assumptions on future ideas.  

Workshop Participants:
The workshop also helped the students to evolve their skills as researchers and critical thinkers equipped to tackle the complex problems of international development and social enterprise. Participants described the workshop as follows:

“This workshop gave me first-hand experience in conducting research in a way that attacks a question from ground zero—the first steps of investigation. When you need to find out about an issue and seemingly no literature exists on it, you cannot simply set up a fixed, concrete research plan to ask the necessary questions, because you do not know what those questions are yet. “

“The lessons learned along the way were greatly instructive in learning how to find which questions to ask, figuring out how to ask them, and plotting out a network of people with the answers.”

“It was a chance to understand a problem in depth through design research techniques and then render an actionable solution. Never before have I better understood the complex puzzle of developing a social venture and how to carefully assemble all the pieces together.”

“This is the first time I’ve been involved in something like this, and I learned so much in such a short period of time. I learned how to conduct interviews, how to evaluate research techniques and conclusions, how to make the most of time on the ground, how to think like a designer, how to observe systems and individuals and their connections, and a host of other things. I’m excited to continue to be involved in the project, and to transfer the skills I’ve gained to future projects.”

Continued Work:
Outputs from the first Impact + Scale workshop are already influencing social entrepreneurs around the world. The Impact + Scale Team is developing frameworks and tools learned from the workshop to influence top social enterprise organizations, accelerators and supporters. Future workshops are being investigated as well as a larger, context-oriented research and design group or lab.

2012 I + S Team:

• Adam White (adam@groupshot.org) is the co-founder of Groupshot and project lead. He has degrees in engineering from Tufts University and City Design from the London School of Economics. He works with and advises social enterprises about context, technology and design around the world.  As a graduate student at the London School of Economics, he was one of 30 finalists from more than 200 entries around the world in the World Bank’s Innovation contest.
• Kate Genereux is a graduate student at The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, focusing on international business, innovation, and women in emerging markets. Prior to Fletcher, Kate worked for Independent Diplomat, a non-profit advisory group that provides confidential advice and practical assistance in diplomatic strategy and technique to governments, political groups and international organizations.
• Jack Miszencin studied international relations and economics at Tufts University, concentrating in development economics and the Middle East. He graduated this spring.  He has studied and worked in the Palestinian Territories and Haiti, and has a particular interest in agricultural development. He is a fluent speaker of Arabic and French and a leader of the Institute’s RESPE Haiti program.
• David Schwartz is a rising senior at Tufts University majoring in English and international relations with a concentration in global health, nutrition, and the environment; he is also minoring in Arabic. David is strongly interested in sustainable development, social entrepreneurship, and socially conscious design. He worked in India last summer, implementing three projects with BUILD: India under the Institute for Global Leadership, and he interned this summer at the Middle East Institute, working to design visual information systems.
• Elyse Voegeli is a rising junior at Tufts, majoring in international relations with a concentration in international security. She grew up in The Bahamas and attended high school in Montana. She is particularly interested in movements of people, especially forced migrations such as human trafficking and refugee situations. She is interested in implementing successful social enterprises and systems designed to repatriate or resettle forced migrants.
• Shirish Pokharel is from Nepal and is a rising sophomore at Tufts majoring in computer science and international relations, concentrating in the Middle East and South Asia. He is interested in education, communication technologies and employment generation in developing countries, donor aid effectiveness, and data processing and visualization. He has co-organized two TEDxKathmandu events and is fluent in Nepali and Hindi/Urdu.

By Adam White