By Maria Carmen S. Apuli | Resource Mobilization Coordinator
DLSU’s advocacy on Social Entrepreneurship through COSCA LSEED progresses with another learning session on “Social Innovations (SI)” facilitated on January 6, 2017. The session, participated by the “Social Enterprise (SE)” student fellows aimed to introduce them to the concept of SI particularly its history, ecosystem, dimensions, as well as its relationship with other disciplines such as social entrepreneurship, social economy, social investments, and social change. To concretize the SI concept, COSCA LSEED’s Development Specialist cited as example a number of SI initiatives during the 18th and 19th centuries including Benjamin Franklin’s modifications on the social organization of communities which contributed to efforts on poverty alleviation. Another SI initiative is Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of ‘creative destruction’ which directly addresses the process of innovation and referring to entrepreneurs as “people who combine existing elements in new ways to create a product or service” thus, initiating and applying SI in their respective fields. The group also discussed the various SI frameworks, definitions of SE, and its relation to social transformation and change.
The student fellows shared their session takeaways on SI, as follows: 1) social innovation is multi-sectoral and multi-stakeholder, 2) SI can be viewed, both as a strategy and an end-in-view, and (3) SI as a never ending process or can be considered as a cycle. Jen, an LSEED student fellow mentioned “What’s important is to remove your focus from the things that you consider best. You need to empathize with the needs of others because that is what will matter in your final product.”
Also, members of the LSEED community core group were introduced to the concept of ‘Design Thinking’ through a workshop session on January 20, 2017 . The activity emphasized the end view of design thinking which is to create and innovate solutions and that problems we encounter in our communities have to be considered as opportunities rather than barriers. The session oriented the participants on the key phases of design thinking with the simple “wallet designing activity.” First phase is 'Empathy' to help understand people within the context of the design challenge. Secondly, the 'Defining Phase' to help facilitate the crafting of meaningful and actionable problem statement and thirdly, the 'Ideate mode' where one focuses on idea generation and which encourages an open communication and collaboration among team members while doing the “Prototyping” and “Testing.”
Majority of the participants pointed out that organizing their thoughts enabled them to come up with better designs. They added that inputs from their counterparts became relevant on the way they designed the wallets especially in terms of functionality. Rowena, a participant shares, when asked of her important take-away from the workshop on “Design Thinking”, “Dapat hindi lamang ang sarili mong ideya ang pwede mong I share, bagkus mahalaga pa rin ang pinagsama-samang ideya upang mabigyan ng magandang solusyon ang problema at nang maunawaan ito ng bawat isa.” (It is good to share not only your own idea, the collective idea, as well, is important in coming up with an appropriate solution to the problem and help each of the participants to understand the same).
By Carmen S. Apuli | Resource Mobilization Coordinator
By Maria Carmen S. Apuli | Resource Mobilization Coordinator
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