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 milestones in the last three months. Hati.my just passed 1,000 NGOs and Do Something Good has passed 20,000 volunteers. Hati.my is Malaysia’s largest open database of social organisations. It has been providing transparency and rich information about the nature and donation needs of NGOs in a way that is turning out to be hugely valuable.
Social innovation incubatee goes live
ShuffleCar, one of the social innovations we’ve been incubating, launched over the past month. ShuffleCar is an innovative carpooling app designed around a number of insights the Lab team has come up with about how carpooling can fit into peoples’ lives and why it hasn’t gone mainstream. The app focuses on enabling users to carpool within networks of trust. It is currently being piloted with 800 students at Taylors University. Software development for the app was carried out by Tandemic’s technology team.
Redesigning financial literacy for university students
It’s safe to say that the for most university students long-term financial planning is not a top priority. How can we redesign the world of financial literacy education for university students — currently dominated by information sharing workshops — to target the creation of specific financial behaviours and habits? Over the past week, the Lab team has been exploring this challenge with a major international bank. Three concepts are being proposed and one of them will go into prototyping and implementation.
Social Enterprise Profile: Kakiseni
There are a lot of people doing great work in the social enterprise space, so we’ll occasionally feature them in our communications.
If you were to pull up a list of Malaysia’s most successful social enterprises, Kakiseni would certainly be near the top. While Kakiseni is over a decade old, Kakiseni has undergone a major transformation from an online news portal around the performing arts industry to a constellation of programmes and initiatives pushing forward the performing arts in Malaysia under the direction of Low Ngai Yuen, former marketing head for Carrefour Malaysia and Singapore.
Kakiseni is still the go-to place for information about the performing arts in Malaysia, but the organisation also runs an online ticketing platform, provides a physical space for talents to showcase their work called FreeSpace, helps manage grant provision for the performing arts sector, and hosts the annual Boh Cameronian Awards, the most prestigious awards in the performing arts sector. You can find out more about Kakiseni at www.kakiseni.com.
All the best,
Kal
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