Andrew Wolk

Back from the Future Trends Forum in Madrid

Posted on 12. Jun, 2009 in Social Entrepreneurship, Social Innovation

I am just returning from Madrid, Spain, where I attended a small convening of 40 people from around the world called the Future Trends Forum (FTF), hosted by the Bankinter Foundation of Innovation, a Spanish bank. Spain is yet another country (see my post on China) interested in advancing a social innovation agenda. There were some familiar faces and social innovation regulars, including Diana Wells from Ashoka and Jim Koch from the Global Social Benefit Incubator, along with others I had not known of and learned a lot from. They included Ted London and his work on investing in the bottom of the pyramid (recently published in Harvard Business Review) and Mahabub Hossain, the head of BRAC, the largest microfinance institution in the world.

I left Madrid with two takeaways I thought were worth sharing. The first was a general agreement that we have been too focused on scale by replication, and have not thought enough about scaling ideas. While this is not new for this blog, I heard a new angle on what should be an increased emphasis on collaboration. As one attendee put it, we do not need another water filtration system to solve the world’s clean water access problem; rather, we need to bring everyone working on the issue of clean water together to collaborate and work on a distribution system of the best solutions.

The other takeaway is the critical importance of making the case for why social innovation is different. It occurred to me that as social innovation emerges into the mainstream, and in order for it to realize its full potential, we will have to answer to stakeholders in all three sectors and general public − what’s different?

Watch a video of my presentation at the FTF here.

Tags: ashoka, bankinter, brac, china, collaboration, diana wells, future trends forum, global social benefit incubator, jim koch, mahabub hossain, scale, Social Innovation, spain, ted london