Rlabs: Journey of Hope Part 4

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En provenance du cours de University of Cape Town

Becoming a changemaker: Introduction to Social Innovation

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University of Cape Town

Becoming a changemaker: Introduction to Social Innovation

224 notes

This free 6 week course is for anyone who wants to make a difference. Whether you are already familiar with the field of social innovation or social entrepreneurship, working for an organization that wants to increase its social impact, or just starting out, this course will take you on a journey of exploring the complex problems that surround us and how to start thinking about solutions. We will debunk common assumptions around what resources are needed to begin acting as a social innovator. We will learn from the numerous examples of social innovations happening all over the world. You will be challenged to get out of your comfort zone and start engaging with the diverse spaces around you. By the end of the course, you will have formed your own approach to social innovation, and you will have begun to develop the concepts, mindset, skills, and relationships that will enable you to start and evolve as a changemaker. You will be able to purchase a Verified Certificate if you wish to show evidence of your achievements, but this is optional, and you may apply for Financial Aid if you are unable to pay the certificate fee. The Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship co-created this course with RLabs, a social movement ‘born-and-bred’ in Bridgetown, Cape Town that is now active in 22 countries. The movement empowers youth through innovative and disruptive technology by teaching them vital skills and providing much needed support and a sense of community. Advocating and supporting initiatives such as RLabs forms part of the Bertha Centre’s mandate. The Centre is a specialised unit at University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business, and is the first academic centre in Africa dedicated to advancing social innovation and entrepreneurship. You can view the course trailer at www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcWYG64WO20 Tweet about this course using the hashtag #socinnMOOC

À partir de la leçon

Innovating by design

A number of methodologies and processes can help generate ideas and creative opportunities, and some of these have been used in business to generate new products and services, and are starting to be applied in social innovation. Human-centred design is incredibly important, and the Design Thinking process allows you to start early and wherever you are with whatever you’ve got. Design Thinking has evolved as a way to respond to deeper user insights, to connect more with people and with communities so that we can actually design solutions that are human-centred. Design Thinking is not just about products, but also helps create new processes, new systems, new services, and importantly even user experiences. Following a Design Thinking process will help you iterate and test your solution with end users, with an emphasis on failing early and often through trying things out and prototyping. Powerful Design Thinking methodology can help you to come up with human-centred design solutions that manifest economic viability, technical feasibility and social desirability in your social innovation.

Rlabs: Journey of Hope Part 47:33

Generating ideas3:00

Design thinking principles7:26

Design thinking steps3:26

Design thinking case studies5:23

Discussing design thinking7:12

Reflecting with RLabs: design in social innovation10:09

Rencontrer les enseignants

François Bonnici
Director
Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town
Warren Nilsson
Associate Professor
Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town
Marlon Parker
Founder
RLabs

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So now after we've done all the training with them and

they've now begun their skilling up of being counsellors,

they were finally ready to start thinking about how are we actually going to

implement all of this new found knowledge into an actual solution.

So the first place for them to start was they decided

that they were going to go to a local school in the community.

And all they were going to do at the time,

they were going to ask if there were any young people that had actually wanted

to ask for help or speak to someone via their mobile phone.

Because the one thing they failed to do was, they don't even know if there were

any people that actually want to access counselling services via these cellphones.

So immediately when they started implementing this they went to

a local school.

They asked the principal, give us your ten worst kids that you have.

I remember the principal told them, can I give you the entire school?

Right, and they negotiated and the principle gave them 20 kids.

And before they knew it, there was young people.

And they told the young people, if you want to speak to us, why don't you just

add us as a contact on your mobile phone, using an instant messenger called Mxit.

And will be available for two hours a day to chat.

That was it.

So the first solution was really just our team chatting via

a computer using an instant messenger, and kids

could really then kind of talk to them as a normal buddy on their mobile phones.

The problem we then faced was were shocked when we found that even though

they only spoke to 20 kids, by the end of the first they had 50 young people!

But having multiple conversations on one computer screen

does become very complicated.

So then, we then saw, but you know, that solution that we had wasn't good enough.

We then started having to get more than one person doing the counselling.

We set up a second computer that we got from a friend of ours who borrowed,

us is his computer, but

the only challenge there was, the two people would see exactly the same screens.

So, we add and create a third person that we called the runner that had to now go and

look at the numbers that would come in and they would actually call out four, five,

six, seven and they would say that person needs to speak to counsellor one.

Counsellor two will talk to the other person and it was a complete mess.

But through all of that,

we just kind of saw the interest from the community that was desperate for help.

And we had the same young men and women, that a couple of months ago

was completely not knowing direction or what they were going to do.

They were now providing counselling services using existing solutions.

And because of all the media attention we got,

there was a national broadcaster that came along and they then gave us an opportunity

to actually tell the world about the work that we are doing.

No, we didn't really know much people watch a breakfast show.

So the morning when the media guys came,

they told us that we had to kind of share what we were doing.

And we shared this on live on air.

And after doing this, that in a couple of minutes we went from a couple of hundred

kids talking to us, asking for help.

And speaking about the challenges they are facing related to substance abuse to

over 10,000.

Immediately, now, this was a Friday morning,

I remember it as if it was yesterday.

Immediately, this solution that we had was not able

to assist tens of thousands of people.

And our system crashed, it broke.

You know, the whole thing completely broke and

immediately we knew that we had to think beyond that.

So that is on Friday, because we told on national television,

we told the people on Monday we were going to be there and

we were going to provide people access to counselling support.

And the other things was we had a lot of our team members,

it was a national television, we didn't want to embarrass them.

So immediately we started looking at what are the other, are there actual organizations or

tools that are currently being used,

that will enable us to do a number of counselling or

at least chatting via that allows multiple people to communicate at the same time.

So we found an open source platform at the time that was available

that allowed us to do some chatting.

But it wasn't a complete solution and I remember contacting the guy asking,

can you help us to just kind of set us up?

And the funny part is that here we were on a Friday night, your innovators and

R&D team are ex-drug addicts, crystal meth dealers, gang members and one guy that

found himself with the most unlikeliest of co-creators, designers and innovators.

And we bought the first version of the solution over the weekend.

Because we have to go live the Monday.

So, when Monday came, and we went live with the solution,

we were up for about 30 minutes, things are going well and

at the same time every experience that we had, we were doing things manually,

we were starting to implement that in our solution.

The part when the conversation comes in and

someone may be looking for a certain type of support,

we couldn't actually divert the person to a counsellor who had that experience.

And the really kind of helped us to understand the solution a bit deeper,

doing it in that way.

The second thing that we found was that

after the first 30 minutes our system crashed again

because the way we setup the solution wasn't capable to handle the load.

So we then reiterated and we came up with a new idea

that we couldn't operate the system on one local computer.

We then had to start thinking about can we actually set this up on a server somewhere.

And we didn't have any experience about servers.

So we had to get someone in that could explain and

support us on how to do we get the solution up on a server.

So now that we actually had the solution on a server and also many people were

able to access it via the Internet and we access it from anywhere.

It actually helped us to not only grow with what we were doing,

but at the same time we were able to evolve the solution every single week.

And through all of this, one of the big lessons that we've learned was that

individuals that was experiencing the challenges, the ones that was part of

the design process and the solution process, they were the ones that actually

came up with all the incredible ideas of what a solution could be like.

We've also had, as part of the solution, then started getting things such as, where

they realised that the amount of people we had to do the counselling wasn't enough.

We needed to expand the counselling beyond just our local community.

So then the teams started going out and they started training

other organizations and other individuals to provide counselling services.

We were then able to scale and

grow the number of people that we were reaching through the solution.

And that actually allowed us to grow and

develop other entities and organizations to use the same solution.

And provide the same services to other communities beyond just on the Cape Flats.

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