Getting real about the social impacts of business practices.
Written on behalf of Net Impact, I spoke with Sally Madsen of Ideo about how design thinking can help organizations contribute to a healthier world, and Kyle Cahill of Oxfam America about the Poverty Footprint Project.
Excerpt: Design Thinking for Social Innovation: A Conversation with IDEO’s Sally Madsen
"As the private sector beings to embrace the possibility that social innovation can lead to a robust bottom line, companies face the very real challenge of figuring out what these efforts might actually look like on the ground. Can a for-profit business truly adapt conventional operational approaches to build a more just and healthy world? How does it measure impacts that go beyond the financial? And how do you get your organization to commit resources to these new approaches? The answers, according to Sally Madsen of design firm IDEO, can be found through a systemic approach to the human experience known as design thinking.
'Design thinking is a process for innovation,' says Madsen. 'It’s a way of thinking that doesn’t depend on those brilliant ideas in the shower' that are not only rare, but hard to replicate or rely on. Madsen, who holds the title Designer of Social Innovation for IDEO, will lead a hands-on workshop at the upcoming Net Impact Conference, in which she’ll help participants learn to apply this process to a range of social issues…"
Read the full article on Triple Pundit.
Excerpt: Beyond the Sweatshop: Developing Tools for Supply Chain Assessment
"One of the most contentious realities of the new economy is that consumers’ concern for the social impacts of any given product or service is increasingly driving their purchasing behavior. This has left companies large and small scrambling to account for those impacts, which can often be difficult to parse and even more difficult to measure. 'Can we come up with a way of working along with the private sector,' asks Kyle Cahill, Senior Program Officer for the Poverty Footprint Project at Oxfam America, 'for them to start approaching social issues with the same rigor and reporting that they use to look at something like climate change, or water?'
Cahill will discuss how the apparel industry in particular is answering this question in response to public concern over sweatshop labor during a Net Impact Conference panel called 'From Boycott to Buycott: Turning the Anti-sweatshop Rhetoric Upside Down.' Oxfam’s Poverty Footprint project is an ambitious undertaking intended to provide a systematic, measurable methodology that corporations can use to evaluate and influence their impacts on actual people and communities – specifically in terms of poverty. But understanding poverty – like most social issues – is not a simple matter…"
Read the full article on Triple Pundit.
