Life

January 27, 2018
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What's available + 3 things you'll want to consider before hiring a training provider. As everyone from businesses to government seeks fresh approaches to solving tough problems and engaging staff in everyday innovation, many are turning to design thinking — also known as human-centred design — to develop innovation capabilities. Design thinking workshops and training are readily available in Malaysia. If you’re looking to engaging a firm, Tandemic and Genovasi are both leading training providers based in Malaysia. Both Tandemic and Genovasi provide a wide variety of training options — from 2-day workshops to programmes...

November 7, 2014
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What does Tandemic do, and how has it been an advocate of social responsibility? We help companies build innovative and more impactful ways of addressing social challenges. For example, we're working with a pharmaceutical company to rethink diabetes prevention. We're moving away from just telling people which foods and activities are good or bad towards actually helping people form lasting habits. We worked with a major international bank to rethink how they do financial literacy education to shift it from PowerPoint...

June 1, 2014
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Assessing possible approaches for the Malaysian government looks to get more value from investments in the social sector By 
Kal Joffres Social impact bonds have become an increasingly discussed topic in Malaysia. But what exactly are they and when does using them make sense? Are there better approaches to getting value out of social sector programmes? This paper compares social impact bonds and evidence-based impact investments as strategies for increasing government returns for investments in social programmes. How do social impact bonds work? A...

May 10, 2014
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By Kal Joffres In the past year, we've spoken to a number of government agencies and foundations that want to create benefits specifically for social enterprises. Many of these policies never materialize because agencies don't have a reliable way of determining what is and what isn't a social enterprise. That's a task that we've taken up by creating the Social Enterprise Policy Working Group. The group's goal is to provide what we're calling a ‘legally operationalisable’ definition of social enterprise. In other words,...

February 1, 2014
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By Kal Joffres “I always tell people that what Malaysia needs is a brand new narrative. There is a lot of cynicism and skepticism. We need to create a new movement to overwrite the current story that's being told.” — Ehon Chan [caption id="attachment_5932" align="aligncenter" width="1024"] Grace Sai, Ehon Chan, and Harvey Koh[/caption] Not many Malaysians know who Ehon Chan is but his message has special resonance with many looking to create social change locally. As co-founder of Hub Sydney, Ehon is building...

December 14, 2013
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By Kal Joffres In early November, we launched a social business at the Global Social Business Summit called Yunus & Youth. It was launched with Nobel Laureate Mohammad Yunus and it all happened in less than 24 hours. This is the story of how it happened and much of it, I think, serves as a reminder of how launching a startup is more about doing and seizing the moment rather than planning to do. It all started as a passing comment. "We keep...

December 13, 2013
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By Kal Joffres The needs assessment is one of the most critical tools to design interventions in the social sector but it is long due for an overhaul. When it comes to understanding the technology needs of social organisations, we've been asking the wrong questions for too long. Many assessments still focus on questions such as; the percentage of NGOs that use cloud services or customer relationship management tools. In truth, these kinds of questions tell us very little about how well...

November 22, 2013
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One of the most common questions Malaysians ask about some trend or other that’s making waves is whether Malaysia is ready for it. After our second screening of Design & Thinking, the movie about design thinking, this was one of the focal points of discussion. Yong Kian, a furniture designer talked about how working across disciplines was a non-negotiable requirement for design thinking to happen: “Design thinking doesn’t work if you don’t have the collaboration across disciplines aspect. It can’t just...