ICTlogy

Maria Prandi, Researcher, Institute for Social Innovation, ESADE
Juan Cano, Entrepreneur and consultant, Semilla Consultores Ltda, Bogotá, Colombia

Co-innovation: innovation through collaboration.

Matrix of innovation based on two axis: technology, and business model. When both have radical advances, we find radical innovation. When both make slight advances, we got incremental innovation. When one factor advances radically and the other just slightly, the outcome is semiradical innovation. Radical innovation is found in mobile phones, where both technology and business models advanced radically. Semi-radical innovation is found in GPSs or digital photography, where only one factor (business model in the former, technology in the later) advances radically and the other one slightly.

Social innovation chooses the most effective among the existing solutions and increases the capacity to innovate socially, because it addresses real needs and/or people’s demands.

In the third sector, social innovation produces new services and outputs along with new sources of income. In the public sector, social innovation is again new public services, along with new policies. The informal sector (non-institutional or non-organized citizens) can provide, with social innovation, new ways of collaboration, along with new ways to adapt to difficulties. In the academic sector, the two axes of radical innovation are connecting science and technology and the ways to train in competences.

Benefits of social innovation:

• More opportunities for generating ideas.
• Broader answers to social needs.
• More efficient, quick, real, agile solutions.
• Coordinated increase of the society’s capacity to act.

Some conclusions on social innovation:

• In social innovation the creative process is as important as the interaction with other actors.
• Social innovation takes place when different sectors overlap.
• Social innovation can be learnt and, over all, can be shared.

Round table on technology enterprises as a driver for social innovation.

Ismael Peña, Professor of Law and Political Science of Open University
Network society and social innovation

Sofía Fernández, Director of Social Responsibility and Innovation in Telefónica and Project Manager of M-Inclusion
M-Inclusion

Mobile broadband and massive adoption of the mobile Internet have disclosed huge opportunities to act and work without any barriers of space. So, what are the incentives that should be put into work so that there were more mobile applications for development and e-inclusion.

We are already finding many examples in apps addressed at solving issues related with health, gender, governance, rural development… and the interesting thing is that there is a market for that, meaning: it is no more about giving money away, but about investment. There can or cannot be profit, but at least economic sustainability can be reconsidered under a very new light.

M-Inclusion is a cooperative framework to encourage the use of innovative, user-oriented, and affordable mobile solutions supporting social integration in Europe and Latin America.

The “divides” are not separate rooms of poverty, but overlap systematically.

It is important to see what are the challenges not only from the technological point of view, but also from the users’ point of view (e.g. accessibility).

We are trying that applications that usually can only run on smartphones can be run on cheaper/simpler terminals.

Patricia Pólvora, Ericsson Response Communications Officer
Ericsson Response

Ericsson Response is a corporate volunteering programme to help humanitarian organizations to communicate, usually in natural disaster situations: what is the necessity, what should we focus at, what are our best partners, what are our values, what are our goals, what is the vision of the whole project. The idea behind Ericsson Response is providing what Ericsson is best at — and/or better than anyone else — and let everyone do what they do best: no overlapping, no competition. Just see where value can be added.

Social innovation is about solving needs, and solving needs is about solving specific needs. And we have to find the best partners so that the addition can create synergies: 1+1 cannot be 2, but 1+1 has to be 3. Nonprofits should learn the language of businesses and of “for-profits”.

After food and water, communication is among the most important needs.

Discussion

Pere Losantos: how is knowledge generated in e-inclusion projects reverting in the core business of the firm? Sofía Fernández: it is the job of the non-profit wing of the company to engage the for-profit wing, raising awareness on the benefits of cooperating in finding new markets, new ideas, new partners.

Carmen Netzel: does Ericsson Response act only in emergencies, or also in situations of “structural poverty”? Patricia Pólvora: only in emergencies. Which means that Ericsson Response works non-profit with NGOs in humanitarian relief, but Ericsson works for-profit with governments and telcos to develop country-wide and stable infrastructures.

Introduction, by Ignasi Carreras

Keys for innovation:

• Link ideas.
• Challenge the “status quo” by questioning it.
• Have an “attentive” eye.
• Share experiences/knowledge in your networks.
• Experiment and essay.
• Learn from errors.

A reference: Rodríguez Blanco, Carreras, Sureda (2012). Innovar para el cambio social (PDF).

Keynote: Jem Bendell, Director of the Institute for Leadership and Sustainability at the University of Cumbria, UK
Unleashing Abundance: “collaborative disruptive social innovation”.

How to enable and foster systemic change? Impact the decision makers. The Deeer Luxury report aimed at raising awareness on how top-level brands were disrespectful for the environment.

Enterprises, especially big companies, can be — should be — used for massive change.

The Internet brings massive potential for change, based on disruptive innovation.

(Bendell describes here a list of disruptive innovations, like Wikipedia, Kickstarter or virtual currencies).

We have to stop thinking that we are poor: there is abundance of resources, beginning with the way we relate with each other, how we are useful to others. To be the change we have to be the change together, and build alternatives together. A way of starting could be getting out of the financial system and see whether we can collaborate without money, just exchanging our own wealth (which is not necessarily money).

Discussion

Q: How to make disruptive innovation and social innovation mainstream? Jem Bendell: try to bring the innovators out of your usual framework, and nurture them. We have to get people out of their comfort zone so that they can see what is happening outside in the world. CEOs should create subsidiaries that only focus on social innovation, taking innovators to see poverty, to see other realities.

Fundació puntCAT — the organization behind the .cat “country” code top-level domain (ccTLD) — is going through a process of strategic reflection on what should its mission be in the following years. As a part of its Advisory Council, I have been invited to provide my insights. Here comes what could be called my “position paper” on the matter. Some of the ideas have been enriched with the dialogue with other members of the Advisory Council, which actually shared most of my points of view.

The need for a transversal, independent institution to foster the Information Society

There are two main issues to be raised about the nature of an institution that has in their mission fostering the Information Society.

The first one is that it has to have a transversal, multidisciplinary approach to the topic. This is rarely found in governments, where such an institution is placed in the organizational chart of a another vertical institution, that is, a given ministry or department. In practice, this means that if the institution is e.g. the Ministry of Industry, the approach when fostering the Information Society will definitely be biased towards infrastructures and the ICT/telecommunications industry — which is the most common example indeed. A solution to this problem is placing our institution that fosters the Information Society up in the department/ministry/cabinet/secretariat of the President or similar. This will work only under two premises: (1) there is no coalition of different parties within the government, so that the government is not split in practice in sub-governments among parties; (2) there are no different factions within the party in the government that fight among them for power — this will rarely happen if ever. Another solution is placing our institution outside of the Government and in hands of the civil society.

The second aspect is that this institution has to be independent. Some of the reasons have already been stated above: only an independent institution can provide advice to policy-makers in matters of Health, Education or Democratic Quality without the risks of being interpreted as a party issue (and not a technical one). But independent does not only means in political terms, but economic ones. A major strength that some institutions of this kind have — like Fundació puntCAT or ICANN itself — is that they have revenues that sustain their activity besides the political colour in the government or the interests of the lobbies.

Functions of an institution to foster the Information Society

There are two sides of the same coin when talking about the functions that can be carried on by institutions to foster the Information Society.

On the one hand, these institutions can provide services in order to assure economic (and political) independence and sustainability. Of course these services will be related with the institution’s mission (e.g. managing a ccTLD). This is the “revenue” side of the institution, especially if it is independent as we defined it before. On the other hand — and this is the point that I would like to stress —, these institutions have an “expenditure” side which focuses on policy-making, on lobbying. Both sides are complementary and essential.

Concerning the part of policy-making and lobbying, I think it is worth mentioning that it is the demand side what is of more concern, especially where a good amount of infrastructures have already been deployed, thus shifting from push to pull strategies.

In this demand-side, pull-strategy approach, there are three issues that are worth being mentioned, and in this specific order:

1. Measuring and analysing the state of development of the Information Society. That is, knowing what is happening and, even more important, why. So, it is not only about the raw measurement and putting data in rows in a table, but putting it in context with other socio-economic indicators, infer the causes of this state of development, its consequences, comparing it with other social or economic realities, etc. Most of the times, data on ICTs come in a much aggregated and sector-centred manner: there is a need to disaggregate, contextualize and characterize these data so that they become knowledge.
2. Provide policy advice on what should be done, in what fields, with what priorities, and adjusting to the available resources. And not only providing advice, but also pointing at the ways to monitor the evolution and measure the impact of applying such policies, what results could be expected and, again, why. Providing policy advice can be made in a lot of ways. The usual one is reports or white papers. But consultancy (which can be pro-bono, of course) and lobbying should also be included in the agenda. And, of course, advice can be provided at different levels: at the state/government level, or at the organization (e.g. SMEs) or individual levels.
3. Directly setting up and carrying on programmes for the development of the Information Society. In other words, designing programmes and executing projects in the field of e-Health, ICT and education, electronic and open government, etc. These programmes and projects, of course, should be very much in line of the two previous points: heavily relying on the evidence raised in the measuring and analysis part, and putting in practice what the policy-advice stage suggested. Deploying protocols and procedures, measuring tools and indicators for monitoring would be the nicest way to close the (virtuous) circle of intervention.

It goes without saying that, in a Network Society, it is not expected that an institution will (a) directly perform all of the aforementioned tasks or functions and (b) do it on its own. I believe there is an opportunity for a new institutional design, more based on enabling that on leading, more based on networking and partnering rather than on competing. I would expect of an institution designed to foster the Information Society to be the visible core of a network of professionals, scholars and policy-makers that work towards the same goal. And the main role of this institution would just be generating the sufficient resources to create, maintain and fuel this network.

During the last two academic courses I have made some collaborations with the Open University of Catalonia’s Business School and the joint project in e-training for unemployed people between this university and the Catalan Employment Service.

I was asked — in both cases — to author some learning materials on Cloud Computing and Social Networking Sites. The target of the courses were micro-entrepreneurs in the former case and unemployed people in the later. Thus, those would be very short courses (usually 4 or 5 weeks long), that required very short time spans (people are busy running their businesses or looking for a job) and with special emphasis that they had to be really practical, avoiding theoretical digressions. In other words: useful courses for partial-time (even casual) learners.

I here present the materials that Mercè Guillén and I penned together. There are a total of 4 learning materials that we are free to share as open educational resources under a CC BY-NC-ND license. The courses are as follows:

• Social networking sites for unemployed people, in Catalan.
• Cloud computing for unemployed people, in Catalan.
• Cloud computing for micro-entrepreneurs, in Catalan.
• Cloud computing for micro-entrepreneurs, in Spanish.

For those interested, you will see that while the Cloud Computing courses share some content, their approach is quite different, the second one (for micro-entrepreneurs) following the usual design of a (fictional) case-study.

Downloads:

Mercè Guillén Solà, Ismael Peña-López (2011).
“Xarxes socials i professionals a l’empresa“. Materials d’aprenentatge per al Programa d’e-Formació del Servei d’Ocupació de Catalunya i la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Barcelona: Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

Ismael Peña-López, Mercè Guillén Solà (2011).
“Cloud computing: introducció als nous models de prestació de serveis i de tecnologia a la xarxa per a l’empresa“. Materials d’aprenentatge per al Programa d’e-Formació del Servei d’Ocupació de Catalunya i la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Barcelona: Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

Ismael Peña-López, Mercè Guillén Solà (2012).
“Informàtica en núvol“. Materials d’aprenentatge per al Programa de Gestió i Direcció de Microempreses de la Business School de la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Barcelona: Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

Ismael Peña-López, Mercè Guillén Solà (2012).
“Computación en la nube“. Materiales de aprendizaje para el Programa de Gestión y Dirección de Microempresas de la Business School de la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya. Barcelona: Universitat Oberta de Catalunya.

ESADE‘s Institute for Social Innovation has just published a new book authored by Mar Cordobés and Beatriz Sanz, and coordinated by Sonia Navarro: TIC, desarrollo y negocios inclusivos [ICT, inclusive development and businesses].

The book deals about Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) but, provided that ESADE is a business school, the approach heavily relies on the role of businesses in achieving this development through ICTs.

The book begins with two initial chapters on ICTs in social inclusion and the role of global businesses in development under the approach of “inclusive markets”. The second part of the book is made up by an analysis of several cases in the field of e-commerce, e-agriculture, learning and training, e-health, e-governance or online volunteering, to name a few.

Part III devotes three chapters to the conclusions and advice for policy-makers, being Part IV four more chapters written by invited contributors (amongst them, yours truly):

• Manuel Acevedo: ICT and human development in Latin America.
• Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol: Mobile communication and social development in Latin America.
• Ismael Peña-López: Key factors for successful ICT4D projects: How can telecoms contribute.
• Vanessa Frías-Martínez: Mobile phones and emergent markets in Latin America.

In what concerns my book chapter, Key factors for successful ICT4D projects: How can telecommunication businesses contribute to the advancement in ICT4D, I begin speaking about general concepts like development, the Information Society and their relationship. I go on stating that digital infrastructures do not necessarily lead to social development, being them “only” a necessary but not sufficient condition that goes in parallel with other important aspects such as a powerful industry, digital literacy, a regulatory framework, or a wide supply of digital content and services.

I end up listing what I think are the three main roles for telecoms in ICT4D:

1. To lower down the “last” barriers of access in what refers to infrastructures: usability, accessibility and affordability.
2. Once physical access is no more an issue, to work for utility, capacity and e-awareness. That is, to raise awareness not only on what can ICTs can be used for, but on how they are transforming our lives and creating new arrays of exclusion for those that do not skilfully use them.
3. Last, but not least, to mind the context: ICTs are a tool and, as such, they multiply the reality they are used in. In this sense, it is very important to remind that ICTs stand for “information” and “communication” technologies, and thus the knowledge gap is a hypothesis that is increasingly been backed up with evidence.

Download the chapter:

Ismael Peña-López (2012).
“Factores clave para el éxito en los proyectos ICT4D. ¿Cómo las empresas de telecomunicaciones pueden contribuir al avance en este ámbito?“. En Cordobés, M., Sanz, B. & Navarro, S. (Coord.) , TIC, desarrollo y negocios inclusivos, Capítulo 13, 183-192. Madrid: Fundación Telefónica, Editorial Ariel.

Download the full book:

Download from the official website.

Alternate download:

Cordobés, M., Sanz, B. & Navarro, S. (Coord.), (2012).
TIC, desarrollo y negocios inclusivos. Madrid: Fundación Telefónica, Editorial Ariel.