Sunday Nov 02, 2025
Sunday Nov 02, 2025
Wednesday, 12 March 2014 00:38 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
I received some important feedback for last week’s article ‘Social innovation: The next business paradigm’. Popular science writer Nalaka Gunawardane tweeted that I should be careful when saying that “…today, social innovation landscape is barren in Sri Lanka”. He gave more examples of social innovations before its time such as the Akshidaana (eye donation) and Saukyadaana (health services) societies, and banks that offer microfinance services.
We hear sporadic stories of individuals who have invented products like convenient sawdust cookers or automated rail gates that can potentially solve social issues. The British Council is currently supporting a team of recent graduates from SLIIT who have developed a wearable device to monitor vital signs of patients and send real-time reports to a mobile phone. We hear about groups of people undertaking social projects like the environmental groups that clean beaches or the fundraising projects for social causes such as the recently opened Tellippalai Trail Cancer Hospital in Jaffna. But how do they make social innovation happen? Let’s try to answer that question by looking at some examples of social enterprises.
Turning threat to opportunity
One of my favourite social enterprise examples is Blue Skyi. It’s a services company in the UK that specialises in grounds maintenance, recycling and waste management and catering; and the only qualification one needs to work there is to have a criminal record!
Like in many populous parts of the world, the rate of ex-offenders relapsing to their previous offences and re-entering the prison within the first two years is alarmingly high in the UK (60% in England and Wales). Maintaining these prisoners is a costly affair. Reoffending costs the UK Government a staggering £ 11 billion (over Rs. 2.4 trillion) each year. Sri Lanka too has an unbelievably high rate of re-offense, especially by burglars and drug-addicts (somewhat connected).
Blue Sky founder and CEO Mick May wanted to understand why this was happening. He found out that the main reason ex-offenders recommitting crime iswas the lack of employment opportunities due to discrimination. He thought that if there was a way to employ them and thereby make them an integrated part of the productive labour force, then the problem would be solved to a large extent. That’s what he did.
His company now employs over 750 ex-offenders and the rate of re-offending by Blue Sky employees is less than 16%, quarter of the national average. In other words Blue Sky and a growing number of similar companies are saving thousands of ex-offenders from re-entering the prison.
Making profit and social impact together
I can almost hear what you’re thinking, “but that’s not going to work in Sri Lanka”. I bet there were a lot people in the UK who thought the same way. ‘Naysayers,’ we have too many of them. Beating the odds, today Blue Sky and its counterparts are thriving. In fact clients increasingly prefer contracting companies like Blue Sky because they are solving a social issue that affects everybody in the society, which they call “intelligent procurement”.
In 2012 they setup another subsidiary to offer employment to serving prisoners as well. Their former employees have moved on to permanent employment while some have even built their own enterprise. Blue Sky is creating what is called ‘social impact,’ a definitive measurement to filter social innovations from the rest. We’ll talk more about social impact next week.
Finding the real problem
Over the weekend I visited a rural village off Mahagalkadawala in the North Western Province together with a group of friends who are trying to develop a sustainable solution to the multifaceted crisis, the ‘Agriculture-based Kidney Disease,’ a social crisis in Sri Lanka at the moment.
We talked extensively with the villagers trying to understand the problem deeply through multiple perspectives. At the heart of the problem lies ‘consumption of contaminated water and food’. I don’t think that the Government or the private sector or even the general public understand the severity of the problem. Solving it will require simple innovative solutions that are designed collaboratively with all parties including the contributors to the problem and the vastly-affected farmer communities. I wonder if there is inspiration which we could draw from the social enterprise ‘Give me tap’.
Edwin Broni-Mensah founded his social enterprise ‘Give me tap’ to simultaneously tackle two problems, the irrational use of single-use plastic water bottles in the UK that end up in landfills, and the use of polluted water by over 300 million people across Africa. His product is a stylish aluminium water bottle sold at a network of cafes and restaurants in Manchester and London with the promise of free refills with (safe) tap water. 70% of the company’s profits are used to build water boreholes and pumps in Africa starting with Namibia.
This exact model is not a solution to the problem in Sri Lanka. But my point is that we need to start asking new questions to the old problems, so that we can find new solutions. But it’s certainly a good idea to tackle the unimaginable amount of plastic water bottle usage in this small country.
Making an enterprise ‘social’
A friend of mine who is an investor in technology start-ups told me that he sometimes receive proposals from social businesses, but he’s not very sure about their structure, and how investment and returns would work with them.
The term social enterprise has been commonly used to identify organisations that use the power of business that bring about social change. But with the amazing growth of social enterprise in the past two decades around the world the concept is sometimes abused by the profiteers. Therefore we need to have clarity on what qualifies to be called as a social enterprise. A social enterprise should have the following characteristicsii:
