For Purpose Beyond Profit
Over the past decade, we’ve seen growing interest in engaging users in the design of new products and services. At the same time, we’ve also witnessed governments and not-for-profit organisations struggling to adequately respond to pressing global challenges. While many organisations might espouse the benefits of community engagement, I’d argue that few are actually succeeding in empowering people to participate meaningfully in shaping their own futures.
Community participation is an area that really interests me. It’s also an area that I’d like others to get equally excited about (fortunately there are some people doing just that–check out Tessy Britton’s previous blog post on participatory cities). It also has huge potential for increased involvement by the private sector. Having worked on many innovation projects initiated by private companies geared at tackling some of society’s grand challenges, I can attest to the opportunities for more community participation, and higher rates of innovation and progress.
An example of this was Go Detroit, an open innovation challenge by Ford designed to engage the community to solve the transportation problems experienced in the city. For Ford, Go Detroit was about finding new mobility solutions and establishing relationships with the citizens and City of Detroit. For the Detroit community, however, this implied that Ford would be solving some of their systemic transportation and socio-economic challenges. This mismatch of expectations demonstrates an underlying tension between what a private company can do, and what society expects they should do. It also raises an important question: What role should private organisations have in seeking to remedy social issues?
“The future of business is a more open, connected, engaging one, and communities are going to change the nature of how we interact with brands, products, and other people.”
Private companies are constrained by shareholder expectations and their mandate for profit; rarely would they give social and economic objectives equal weight. However, innovation should create value that benefits everyone, and I believe there is a responsibility for anyone engaged in innovation processes to seriously consider the social and ethical outcomes as much as the economic. Given the extent of many current global challenges, the expectation for the private sector to participate in the process of addressing social issues will only continue to increase. Solving these complex problems requires the involvement of many people across multiple organisations and sectors, and we can all play a bigger role in extending the invitation for more people-powered and participatory innovation processes.
Open innovation programs, like Go Detroit, provide a means for private companies to enable meaningful community participation that can help to address these challenges. It also presents a much-needed opportunity to integrate social outcomes as part of an organisation’s core business rather than just one-off corporate social responsibility programs. So let’s keep questioning the role of private organisations in tackling social issues and re-envision a new model of community engagement, one that we can all be excited about!
