Social Innovation Lab

June 15, 2013
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The past few months have been quite busy for the Social Innovation Lab, where we’ve been working on incubating and accelerating social innovations, so here are a few updates on what we’ve been working on. We’re always looking for more great people and organisations to collaborate with and extend our work, so if you think there is anyone we should connect with, I’d love to hear from you. Two Lab initiatives hit major milestones Two social initiatives at the Lab have passed important...

March 3, 2013
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The Design Thinking Toolkit we've been working on is finally making its way to printing and manufacturing. We're excited to be sending it out selected student groups in Malaysia so they can start discovering how design thinking can help them come up with great, human-centred innovations for social projects, business initiatives -- and certainly many other things we haven't imagined yet. Why the Design Thinking Toolkit? There's a lot of great work that's already been done out there by our friends...

October 20, 2012
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Collaboration is something that is baked into the core of the Social Innovation Lab. We started it because we wanted to work on creating more social innovations — and the only way we could do that is by collaborating with more people and organisations to make it happen. But how can people get involved in projects at the social innovation lab? We’ve put together a short guide on how you can get involved — regardless of how much time you...

October 17, 2012
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Over the weekend, I facilitated a workshop on design thinking for a group of social entrepreneurs at Changeweekend. Seeing people who want to create social impact engage with design thinking was a hugely rewarding experience. I think two big take-aways for the social entrepreneurs this weekend were (1) it’s surprisingly easy to prototype new products and services and (2) people with all kinds of backgrounds, including psychology and anthropology, can play an important role in the innovation process. Many social...

October 14, 2012
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Over the past few months, we’ve been helping run Changeweekend, a programme in Kuala Lumpur that helps social enterprises become operationally ready and helps nonprofits transform themselves into social enterprises over 10 months. Working on this programme has been hugely interesting, particularly as we look to it as a test bed for new approaches to building social enterprises. Design Thinking and Lean Startup have been deeply embedded throughout the programme. With organisations from Nepal, Vietnam, the Philippines, Singapore, and of course...

August 22, 2012
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Testing GeoRSS for volunteering opportunities When you’re working on a software product, getting new features is kind of like unwrapping presents. There’s a lot of excitement about testing them out and finally delivering them to users. At Do Something Good, we’ve been unwrapping pretty frequently. New features are deployed to the site almost weekly. We have a couple of important features going out this week: automatic detection of your location and matching of volunteering opportunities based on your interests. Geolocation is going...