Social Innovation Lab

November 7, 2014
By

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...

May 10, 2014
By

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
By

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
By

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
By

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 17, 2013
By

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...

July 12, 2013
By

Acumen+ recently launched an online human-centred design for social innovation course. This is a great opportunity to learn more about how design thinking can be applied in the social context. We’re hosting the Kuala Lumpur meet-up for the course at Makespace every Tuesday 8-10pm for the duration of the course. At the meet-up, we’ll be running through the content, choosing a problem to solve, and collaborating on solving it. Click here to join the meet-up. The post Join the meet-up on design...