Blog

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...

October 7, 2014
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Since as far as we can remember, study tours have been one of the main approaches governments use to learn from each other. During a study tour, senior government officials from one country might visit the facilities, attend presentations, and observe the programmes implemented in another country over a few days with the intent of learning something that can be applied back at home. The trouble is these tours are fraught with challenges. What if the understanding officials glean about local...

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...

November 17, 2013
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We were blown away by the response to our screening of Design & Thinking earlier this week at Makespace. We thought it would be a small showing with a dozen people – but more than 50 people registered. We’ve had to hold a second screening for friends who weren’t able to get into the first screening. This post looks at the movie and some of the discussion we had following the screening. For a long time, design thinking was a magical...

October 15, 2013
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Last weekend the 4th Global Entrepreneurship Summit conferences wrapped up and I think I can say without too much of a question mark that this was Malaysia's best entrepreneurship conference to date. I may be a bit biased of course because Tandemic played a role in organising the conference. We oversaw track 3 on emerging trends at the conference, which hosted speakers including Chris Anderson (The Long Tail), Jeff Hoffman (Priceline), and James Canton (The Extreme Future). The lead organiser...