Ever heard the saying "A butterfly flaps it's wings in Brazil and there's a tsunami off the coast of Japan."?
Last night's event at The Hub in Islington was great. Disruptive innovation is about creating something that fundamentally shifts the way things are done. Using analogies from Systems Thinking, the whole world is a complex web of interactions that localise around tightly linked processes that are all loosely linked to other tightly linked to other localised processes. Disrupting the norm in one small area then, can have a follow on effect to the way the whole world works. This interesting aspect of Chaos Theory is also known as the Butterfly Effect.
It made me think about the social norms that I am looking to disrupt. By making it easy to volunteer and coming at it from a social networking perspective, essentially I'm looking to disrupt the social apathy of the Facebook generation. No big task then!!
Anyway here's 2 interesting things I learnt for Social Entrepreneurs
- That it helps to map the entire localised system that your particular idea fits into. This will help you understand the causality of the social changes you are looking to effect
- That banks are more forgiving than other funders when it comes to risky ideas, as long as you can be clear around how you can make it work
The great thing about this event was that the founders shared part of their toolkit. I found this very useful. Once you've heard someone talk about their enterprise a couple of times, you've really heard most of it, because it's all really the same thing after a while. You pick up a couple of interesting things, but given our busy lives, maybe not enough to justify the time spent. So this sharing of directly useful ways of doing things really made the evening worthwhile. That and I met some cool and interesting people that I hope to catch up with again.
This event will run every first Tuesday of the month. Definitely worth checking out if you're looking at creating a social enterprise.
