Stanford Social Innovation Review Podcast

Start-Up Chile is a program funded by the Chilean government that aims to attract early-stage global entrepreneurs. In this audio interview Stanford Social Innovation correspondent Ashkon Jafari talks with Nicolas Shea, the innovation and entrepreneurship advisor to the Chilean minister of economy, about how the program offers $40,000 grants and one-year visas to entrepreneurs who agree to live and work on a new high-tech venture for six months in Santiago. Nicolas discusses how the program began, its goals and vision, and some of the enterprises currently being seeded.https://ssir.org/podcasts/entry/nicolas_shea_international_development_and_entrepreneurship

The power of social norms has been used to promote energy conservation and other prosocial outcomes.  From studies involving the reuse of hotel towels, energy consumption in towns, and the reduction of theft at national forests, UCLA Anderson School of Management Professor Noah Goldstein demonstrates that individuals are greatly influenced when they know how peers behave in the same situation. This presents an opportunity for marketers, managers and policymakers to craft messages that encourage positive activity. Goldstein spoke at Small Steps, Great Leaps, a special research briefing convened by Professor Francis Flynn and Jennifer Aaker and their colleagues in the field of prosocial behavior.  They presented practical, and cost-effective solutions for encouraging donations, volunteerism, social activism, and other responsible, caring, and prosocial behaviors.https://ssir.org/podcasts/entry/noah_j._goldstein_the_role_of_social_norms_in_energy_and_water_conservation

Philanthropy and fundraising sometimes involve making that all-important call to a potential donor. It can be a thankless, depressing job. In this university podcast, Wharton associate professor Adam Grant shares research about the effectiveness of paid and volunteer call centers. Noting what executives and nonprofit leaders think are the most effective interventions to motivate fundraisers—and why those are dead wrong –- he discusses what can be done to help money-soliciting callers become more enthused and successful. The talk should be of interest both to managers who supervise callers and to fundraisers themselves. Grant spoke at Small Steps Big Leaps: The Science of Getting People to Do the Right Thing, an event sponsored by the Center for Social Innovation at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Adam Grant is an associate professor at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. His research focuses on work motivation, job design, prosocial helping and giving behaviors, meaningful work, initiative and proactive behaviors, and employee well-being. He has taught executive education, consulted, and presented for a variety of clients. His articles have been published in a wide range of leading management and psychology journals. Grant has also served as director of Let’s Go Advertising Sales. He earned his PhD from the University of Michigan in organizational psychology and his BA from Harvard University.https://ssir.org/podcasts/entry/philanthropy_and_fundraisers_motivation

It is not news that nonprofit organizations with robust infrastructure — including sturdy information technology and financial systems, skills training, fundraising processes, and other essential overhead — are more likely to succeed than those without. Yet most nonprofits do not spend enough money on capacity building and systems. Ann Goggins Gregory and Don Howard of the nonprofit management consultancy The Bridgespan Group, look at the reasons so many nonprofits find themselves in a perpetual starvation cycle. The two consultants reveal what nonprofits and funders can do to break out of the cycle, so that overhead problems do not thwart organizations from achieving success in the pursuit of their missions and goals. They spoke at the Nonprofit Management Institute convened by the Stanford Social Innovation Review. Ann Goggins Gregory is the director of knowledge management at The Bridgespan Group and a former consultant in Bridgespan’s strategy area. In her consulting work, her clients included education and youth development organizations as well as foundations. Don Howard is a partner at The Bridgespan Group, where he leads the San Francisco office. His clients have included foundations and nonprofits working to alleviate poverty, end homelessness, revitalize neighborhoods, end inequities in education, and improve the environment.https://ssir.org/podcasts/entry/ending_the_nonprofit_starvation_cycle

In 2010 Katherine Fulton, President of the Monitor Institute, took a three-month break from her long and impressive career strategizing for nonprofit and entrepreneurial organizations. The time off renewed her and gave her insights into the challenges nonprofit professionals face in an increasingly fast-paced, demanding world. In this audio lecture, sponsored by the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Fulton advises those who labor in what she calls “communities of hope” to slow down in order to find the courage to reflect on the many uncertainties ahead. Her five recommendations, one of which is to love the challenges themselves, are practical, highly philosophical, and very personal. Katherine Fulton is a partner of the Monitor Group and President of the Monitor Institute, which is dedicated to helping innovative leaders achieve sustainable solutions to social and environmental problems. She has spent three decades catalyzing social change as a leader, strategist, teacher, editor, writer, speaker, and advisor. Fulton is the recipient of a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University and a Lyndhurst Foundation prize for community service, and is the co-author of several books, among them Looking Out for the Future: An Orientation for the Twenty-First Century Philanthropists and What If? The Art of Scenario Thinking for Nonprofits.https://ssir.org/podcasts/entry/leadership_in_an_uncertain_world

Annually, more than a trillion dollars are spent on millions of American nonprofit and government institutions. And 15 nonprofits are started each day. But there is still not significant progress on social issues in the United States. In this audio lecture, sponsored by the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Andrew Wolk, CEO of Root Cause, argues that the time has come for a social impact market—one that fosters innovation and collaboration across the governmental, business, and nonprofit sectors to maximize scarce resources and spread solutions. Wolk believes this cross-sector approach presents our best chance to solve long-term educational, healthcare, environmental, and other problems.https://ssir.org/podcasts/entry/the_emerging_social_impact_market

BigTent arose out of a need to find a white-label platform to support volunteer-based group leaders without a lot of operations money. Groups such as PTAs, alumni groups, and new-mother groups need to be able to maintain membership lists and have a means of disseminating important information, organizing volunteers for events, and other activities. In this interview conducted by Sheela Sethuraman, Laney Whitcanack talks about how BigTent offers online aid for the self-perpetuation of these inherently intimate groups, which typically have both online and offline member connections. It’s quality in relationships, not quantity, that Whitcanack emphasizes. Advertising sponsors recognize the worth of volunteer leaders and “household CEOs,” as Whitcanack dubs the typical involved moms, who make decisions for families and influence their communities. Laney Whitcanack focuses on online and offline innovations that connect people with communities they care about. Taking notice of the scarcity of good and cheap technology to support groups, and being part of 27 Yahoo! groups herself, Whitcanack cofounded BigTent in 2006. She spent the decade previous to BigTent coaching and training hundreds of community leaders, in the U.S. and Mexico, most recently as the Director of Community Programs for the Coro Center for Civic Leadership. While at Coro, Whitcanack co-founded The Princess Project in 2002, engaging thousands of girls and women across California each year in volunteer opportunities. A published author and speaker on entrepreneurship and community organizing, she received the Jefferson Award for Public Service in 2008. Whitcanack has a BA from UCLA, an MBA from the Simmons School of Management, and an EdM from Harvard University.https://ssir.org/podcasts/entry/nonprofit_management_the_art_of_organizing_volunteers

Small business is about doing what needs to be done for the customer in front of the counter. It’s the model of innovation, efficiency, and customer service. So when Intuit, which serves small businesses with its tax and accounting software, and eBay, arguably the largest small business incubator in the world, wanted to talk to small businesses about green initiatives, they had a lot to say. Now both Intuit and eBay have sites for the small businesses they serve to ‘talk green.’ They’ve picked up a lot of insight. In September, eBay launched the reuseable eBay box. The green revolution comes from the far ends of individual thinking, lab science, and it can lead to legislation that sometimes vindicates and sometimes blindsides small businesses. Some small businesses already have solutions. Everyone could use a little more information-sharing. The information is difficult to aggregate, but it’s out there. Amy Skoczlas Cole, of eBay says in 2007 the eBay Green Team assembled forty-strong, grew to 24,000 employees, and when they opened it to eBay users, 300,000 signed on. eBay Green Team members had to learn it was a two-way conversation. Better ideas from their sellers led them to change strategy from “providing information” to “asking questions to provoke conversation.” eBay customers were particularly interested in reducing package waste. One outcome is the reuseable, trackable, eBay Box, launched in September 2010. Intuit has a very successful site for sharing small business tax tips. Now, through IntuitGreen.com, small businesses can share green ideas, too. Rupesh Shah of Intuit has found small businesses have practiced ‘corporate responsibility’ as a matter of course, long before it had a name. They’re concerned about waste, especially of time and money, yet they’re very focused on keeping good relationships in the community around them. But sometimes shear lack of time isolates small businesses from information that can keep them in synch with the times. Amy Skoczlas Cole’s passion for the natural world started in kindergarten, when she first wrote an essay on her love for koala bears. After studying environmental policy in college, she joined the staff of Conservation International (CI), where she turned her passion into a career. At eBay, she leads all the different aspects of the company’s environmental strategy. What excites her most, though, is tapping into the collective power of the 90-95 million people who use eBay to make a real difference in world. That’s why she loves running the eBay Green Team, building a movement to help consumer save money and the planet at the same time – by using products that already exist in the world. Rupesh D. Shah is the Director of Corporate Sustainability at Intuit, a leading software solutions provider and the makers of TurboTax and QuickBooks. Rupesh has led a wide-variety of initiatives including new products and partnerships, conducting detailed environmental assessments, developing corporate-wide sustainability goals, and increasing the transparency of Intuit’s efforts. Prior to that, Shah was Director of Product Management for TurboTax Business products and previously he helped to create and launch new industry-specific versions of QuickBooks. Shah has also served as Manager of Learning and Development at Odwalla and Training Manager at Earth Train, an environmental nonprofit organization dedicated to providing youth leaders the skills, resources, and network to make a difference in their local communities. He has also consulted for AmeriCorps, the Presidio Leadership Center, the Corporation for National Service, Gorbachev Foundation, the United Nations and various other leading social organizations around the world. Shah has a MBA from the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, Northwestern University, and a BA from the University of California, San Diego.https://ssir.org/podcasts/entry/environmental_sustainability_for_small_businesses

In the developing world, healthcare is often a scarce commodity. That’s why innovative products such as those being produced by re:motion designs are so important. In this audio interview, Stanford Center for Social Innovation correspondent Ashkon Jafari talks with CEO Joel Sadler about the company’s initial product, the JaipurKnee, an artificial knee joint costing less than $20 that is dramatically changing the lives of amputees in developing countries. He describes how he became invovled in the field of medical devices, how his engineers have approached design and prototyping, and how the company has secured funding and created partnerships. He also offers advice for the aspiring engineering or design student. Joel Sadler is the co-founder and CEO of re:motion designs. A former product designer at Apple, he is currently a fellow and lecturer at the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford University. A Jamaican native, Sadler was inspired to work on low-cost medical devices after an MIT fellowship to design affordable wheelchairs in Mexico. He holds degrees in mechanical engineering from MIT and Stanford.https://ssir.org/podcasts/entry/applying_design_thinking_to_healthcare

At the conference “Small Steps, Big Leaps: The Science of Getting People to do the Right Thing,” scientists present tactics for summoning better behavior. They brief attendees at the Center for Social Innovation on data that shows that “gentle nudges, subtle tweaks, and quiet prompts ” are more effective tactics for encouraging social responsibility. Appealing to the better angels of our nature sounds good in theory, but in this audio lecture, Stanford professor Francis Flynn offers practical solutions to problems such as how to ask people for help, how to motivate people to ask for help, and what to do after people have refused to help. He sheds light on what it means to take the perspective of the person asking for help versus the perspective of the person being asked. His counter-intuitive results spark interesting questions from the audience, many of whom are in nonprofits dependent on volunteer recruitment and fund-raising to achieve their goals. Francis Flynn says he chose an academic career, in part, because he found the level of “asking for stuff” in a social work career a bit too uncomfortable. In this lecture, Professor Flynn says he brought curiosity about that to his research. His studies focus on social influence and cooperation; they illuminate patterns of interpersonal relations, leadership, diversity and helping behavior in organizations. Flynn has been a Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business since 2006. Flynn received a PhD in Organizational Behavior at the University of California, Berkeley. He then taught at Columbia Business School until 2006. Today at Stanford, he also acts as the Director of the Center for Leadership Development and Research.https://ssir.org/podcasts/entry/if_you_need_something_just_ask

Identity-related purchasing decisions are illuminated by Leif Nelson who shows how cause-related marketing intersects with pay-what-you-want pricing. Nelson contends greater revenue and increased goodwill for corporate sponsors can be directly related. These field experiments at major theme parks manipulated various aspects of the purchasing experience for souvenir action photos. Nelson shares his research group’s results and methodology. Finally, he defines a new concept of “shared social responsibility.” Leif Nelson and his co-authors, Ayelet Gneezy and Uri Gneezy, published “Shared Social Responsibility: A Field Experiment in Pay-What-You-Want Pricing and Charitable Giving” in Science magazine. They found that while fewer people purchase pay-what-you-want items linked to charitable donations, the price per item rose more than enough to compensate for the slight loss in volume. Total corporate revenue was greater when charitable donations were involved. Purchasers consistently reported feeling more positive about a company that offered pay-what-you-want pricing linked to charitable donations. The increased revenue for corporations is supported by social norms that encourage generosity towards charities. Nelson explored the possibility that corporations might re-purpose their current charitable contributions to be linked to pay-what-you-want purchases.https://ssir.org/podcasts/entry/leif_nelson_name_your_price

How can you boost credibility to nonprofits, who may appear to be warm, but needy?  Or how do you promote warmth and admirability to for-profits, who may appear to be competent, but greedy?  Marketing professor Jennifer Aaker shows how stereotypes can be reframed to influence consumer behavior - nonprofits see greater fundraising success when they highlight the effectiveness of their work rather than their need, while for-profits aligned to a social mission convey a greater sense of social consciousness than their competitors. Aaker spoke at Small Steps, Big Leaps, a special research briefing she convened with Professors Francis Flynn and their colleagues in the field of prosocial behavior. They presented practical, and cost-effective solutions for encouraging donations, volunteerism, social activism, and other responsible, caring prosocial behaviors. Jennifer Aaker, social psychologist and marketer, is the General Atlantic Professor of Marketing at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business. Her research spans time, money and happiness. She focuses on questions such as: What actually makes people happy, as opposed to what they think make them happy? How do small acts create significant change, and how can those effects be fueled by social media? She is widely published in the leading scholarly journals in psychology and marketing, and her work has been featured in a variety of media including The Economist, The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, BusinessWeek, Forbes, CBS MoneyWatch, NPR, Science, Inc, and Cosmopolitan. A sought-after teacher in the field of marketing, Professor Aaker teaches in many of Stanford’s Executive Education programs as well as MBA electives including Designing Happiness, Brands, Design & Social Technology, How to Tell a Story, and The Power of Social Technology. Recipient of the Distinguished Teaching Award, Citibank Best Teacher Award, George Robbins Best Teacher Award and both the Spence and Fletcher Jones Faculty Scholar Awards, she has also taught at UC Berkeley, UCLA and Columbia.https://ssir.org/podcasts/entry/firm_stereotypes_matter

Money doesn’t make you happy, but giving it away does. This is the theme of an audio lecture given by Harvard Business School Professor Mike Norton at the Stanford Center on Social Innovation’s conference, Small Steps, Big Leaps: The Science of Getting People to Do the Right Thing. Norton discusses his research on how much money a person must spend, and under what conditions, in order to experience an increase in happiness and well-being. He also focuses on practical applications of his knowledge, strategizing creative ways for companies to engage in philanthropy and to encourage their employees to donate money. Mike Norton is an associate professor of business administration in the marketing unit at Harvard Business School. After earning a BA in Psychology and English from Williams College and a PhD in Psychology from Princeton University, he was a fellow at the MIT Media Lab and at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. His research focuses on consumer behavior, consumer psychology, decision-making, nonprofits, and social enterprise.https://ssir.org/podcasts/entry/philanthropy_can_be_good_for_you

With money on the mind, people work harder and longer before asking for help and are more reticent to help others.  This self-sufficiency orientation elicits less prosocial behavior, such as the willingness to volunteer or donate to causes. Marketing professor Kathleen Vohs’ research finds that money acts as a psychological resource that changes people’s motivations. In a series of lab experiments, primed subjects subtly exposed to the concept of money are more motivated by their own goals and are less socially focused.  Vohs spoke at Small Steps, Big Leaps, a special research briefing convened by Professors Francis Flynn and Jennifer Aaker and their colleagues in the field of prosocial behavior. They presented practical and cost-effective solutions for encouraging donations, volunteerism, social activism, and responsible, caring and other prosocial behaviors.https://ssir.org/podcasts/entry/kathleen_vohs_8212_money_makes_people_less_socially_focused

Dysfunctional water and sanitation infrastructure can be seen strewn all across the developing world. Wells, pumps, and toilets fall into disrepair and areas once pronounced “covered” are again confronted by problems resulting from a lack of clean drinking water and sanitation. This exacerbates the challenge of achieving the Millennium Development Goals for water and sanitation. In this audio interview, part of a Stanford Center for Social Innovation series on water, Water for People CEO Ned Breslin talks with Stanford MBA student Ashish Jhina about performance metrics, planning, and financing practices aimed at supporting a longer term vision for water and sanitation infrastructure. He stresses the importance of setting appropriate tariffs and of budgeting for inevitable operational and maintenance costs from the outset. He explains how new business models could catalyze local entrepreneurial involvement in sanitation thereby making efforts to improve sanitation coverage more successful and sustainable. Edward D. (Ned) Breslin joined Water For People as its director of international programs in January 2006, and was appointed acting CEO in late 2008. The board hired him as chief executive officer on May 13, 2009. Ned was first introduced to the challenges of water supply when living in the Chalbi Desert of northern Kenya in 1987, linked to a Lutheran World Relief program through his university – St. Lawrence. He subsequently worked for a range of local and international water and sanitation sector NGOs in South Africa, Zimbabwe and Mozambique, including positions at the Mvula Trust and as country representative for WaterAid in Mozambique, before joining Water For People.https://ssir.org/podcasts/entry/new_business_models_and_metrics_for_water