Social Innovation Podcast

We discuss the unicity and value add of practices unique to social entrepreneurship and the ability to drive focus on purpose of business.We talk about the trend of increasing popular momentum not the least in financing impact but the need for patient capital and stimulation of supply of project pipelines as well as stimulation of demand for social enterprise products and services.

In this episode, the national coordinator for mental health, Ing-Marie Wieselgren from the National Association of Regions and Municipalities, discusses the state of mental health in Sweden and what we can do to improve and innovate for a mentally healthier Sweden. This episode is in Swedish. A catch up episode in English will follow.

Norrsken Foundation CIO Tove Larsson expands on investment themes, trends and the challenges of impact investing

Social democrat and chairman of Norrköping municipality Lars Stjernkvist speaks about municipalities innovating approaches to social investments and social innovation.

Andreas König CEO of Just Arrived and Just Tech talks about innovating with tech for labour market integration of migrants coming to Sweden.

Kristian Ranta of MERU Health discusses the opportunities and challenges of innovating in clinical mental health and how MERU created its own innovation platform to validate new solutions.

Annica Johansson from Reach4Change* expands on how impact is measured in social enterprises and how to take measurement beyond tedious reporting toward an everyday resource for improving business and learning. *upon release of this episode, Executive Director at Effektfullt

Martin Siltberg from Sana Labs speaks about how artificial intelligence can improve education and even crack scale language training for migrants integrating in new societies.

Erik Fernholm, CEO of 29k talks in this first of two episodes about the need to democratise personal growth and development to drive sustainability in society. 29k seeks to make cutting edge personal development available globally for under 1 USD per person.

Johan Oljeqvist is the CEO of Fryshuset, one of Sweden's most successfulnon-profit organizations. They have mastered the art of hybrid organization and governance, simoultaneously being a member based non-profit, a foundation, a profitable business and a lobby organization. Johan makes the case for how to build and grow from your values as an organisation and what it takes to live your values when they come into conflict with society and stakeholders. His advice is to get to know the target group you want to serve and any other clients you work with, get to know them deeply and make sure you have people people who have the ability do develop relationships and gain trust. Being a hybrid organisation, part nonprofit, part business, part partner to public sector can be confusing for the rest of society and requires a lot ot work but also allows for collaborating in different ways, building diverse income streams and becoming less dependent on individual clients or stakeholders support. This is key to be able to take risks and survive speaking truth to power and stakeholders - instead of becoming risk averse and choosing not to do your best to serve your target group.

Since the episode was recorded sustainable bonds have advanced further! 17% of all bonds in SEK are now green and more sustainable bonds (green and social) have been realised.

The case for social investments in welfare/government The social contract of welfare is under strain and public confidence in the services provided by government is wavering. There is a need to drive more efficient use of public resources in order to more cheaply drive impact and outcomes as well as freeing up public resources to adequately cover critical needs. Social investments as a phenomenon are growing as a potential solution to evolving problems in welfare and public service delivery. Social investment can drive early interventions that save government resources downstream in the development life cycles of welfare problems. Government services are not proactive enough to catch welfare problems before they become complicated. Legislation requires public services to react when problems become visible but there are no direct incentives to stop problems from developing in the first place. Sweden is innovative in that many municipalities (80ish) that have allocated money into "social investment funds" to try to fund early interventions. Private investors participating in public social investments can share financial risks, provide support in governance and management of implementation and navigate markets of solutions and service providers. Social impact bonds / social outcomes contracts Traditional procurement drives much to strong focus on activities rather than results and outcomes leading to the potential for public buyer and private/non-profit service provider incentives to diverge. A new trend in public procurement is contracting on outcomes to align incentives of public, non-profit and private actors around specific measurable outcomes. Social outcomes contracts / Social Impact Bonds are a new experimental type of contracts between public and private/non-profit service providers and private investors to try new operating models to solve social problems. Intermediaries are brokers of relationships and project management experts that help private, non-profit and government parties to align and find agreement on social investments. Public sector organizations are generally not capable of analyzing needs and potential solutions of complex welfare problems. Further they have a terrible track record of following through on projects that run for more than 1 year and especially get sloppy around evaluation and lessons learned from implemented projects. Potential areas for social innovations and investment Labor market integration Social integration of migrants Prevention of health problems, mental health notably Any issue area where the responsibilities and specifications for functional solutions span across public sector silos or across public, private and non-profit sectors. This is the Achilles heel of the public sector, the inability to organize across silos or across sectors.