Co-innovation in the Engineering Sector: Restructuring A Non-Profit to Achieve Social Infinity
Creating Context
To take on these complex issues, the challenge engineers face is to marry old values of safety, quality and conservativeness with a new order of sustainability, innovation and social development. Companies in particular need to create a dual-space where young professionals can live out their enthusiasm and where the older generation that provides stability, institutional memory, and technical know-how does not feel estranged by an overdose of change and flexibility. Cultural harmony aside, knowledge management is an increasing problem in unwieldy global organisations. When taking this into account, the need for uniting generations around a common goal of social innovation does not only have marketing benefits, but makes business sense.
Introducing Engineers Without Borders South Africa (EWB-SA)
EWB-SA has placed itself at the nexus of generations, cultures and classes to facilitate a new era of engineering. The organisation is a national co-ordinating body that sees itself as the parent for future Engineers Without Borders Chapters in Southern Africa. The main aim of EWB-SA is to partner with communities and community-based organisations to provide members of these communities with the opportunity to improve their quality of life in a sustainable manner, in particular but not exclusively by providing access to engineering expertise, skills and technologies.
A stepped approach is required to realise these goals. The first step is to foster symbiotic partnerships between communities, NGOs, institutes of higher education, the engineering sector, businesses and government organisations. Symbiotic partnerships point at mutual gain and skills development for all involved. Secondly, EWB-SA encourages two-way learning processes through knowledge sharing and self-development. The ability to tackle unsolved problems with unconventional approaches is neither taught at universities nor guaranteed to be acquired through traditional experience. Curiosity, observation and altering one’s perspectives are necessary and cannot be assumed to come naturally. EWB-SA sees the need to train and develop its volunteers, partners and members as vital to its success. Thirdly, sustainability comes through ownership and ownership is a result of empowerment. To ensure long term sustainability of projects and the organisation as a whole, communities and volunteers alike must feel empowered and in control of their ideas and actions. Finally, emphasis is placed on multiplying project outcomes by encouraging growth of knowledge from one project cycle to the next. The advantage of being a national organisation with regional and local chapters is that successful projects can spark similar initiatives across the country that build on previous learnings.
Over the next years, EWB-SA has planned four strategic interventions:
At its core remains the drive to initiate sustainable, community-based projects in areas such as infrastructure, water, sanitation, education and energy, while laying the foundations for community ownership of these projects. EWB-SA will primarily develop and promote sustainable technologies that take into consideration the environment, the context of their application and the needs, values and capabilities of the end-users.
To create the required volunteer-base, EWB-SA is building a community of like-minded individuals interested in applying social innovation and humanitarian engineering skills to achieve systemic change in African communities.
EWB-SA sees itself as a knowledge community, encouraging research and motivating engineering students and professionals to educate themselves about their responsibility in engineering a sustainable future for all people living on this planet.
Mentorship is seen to hold vital potential in stimulating cross-generational and cross-class knowledge transfer. By creating a platform for interaction, EWB-SA will foster mentorship relationships and friendships throughout the various phases of its projects.
Dilemmas hinder the growth of non-profit companies
To achieve its vision that every community or organisation in need of engineering skills has access to technical expertise, the entire engineering sector must unite behind EWB-SA. Building a non-profit company to serve a nation by drawing on the input of all its role players requires a high level of coordination and collaboration that demands a new strategy and different thinking. Most non-profit companies (NPCs) are driven by a small number of individuals that see a gap – a social needs gap, a service delivery gap, a sustainable development gap or any other gap. These individuals get involved because they want to make a difference and change the world for the better. Often they are prepared to start small, to make a difference to one life at a time. Intentions and incentives may vary across the sector, but challenges encountered are similar. Ultimately, the greatest constraint NPCs face in extending their reach remains the number of enthusiastic volunteers that are prepared to drive the organisation. To increase the reach and capacity of NPCs, an approach to up-scaling volunteering must be developed.
At the heart of the challenges faced in developing EWB-SA into a self-propelling organisation lie dilemmas as described by visionary thinker, Fons Trompenaar. In his terms, dilemmas arise from contradicting core values: we want to live globally, but we want to feel at home locally; we want to be unique, but we want to belong to a community; we want reduced pollution and waste, but we want to maintain luxurious standards of living… The thought processes of the past millennium impose bipolar thinking, where these dilemmas can only exist at their extremes, or maybe as a compromise that meets halfway. Yet, to create wealth is to combine values that are not easily joined. Dilemma reconciliation, in Trompenaar’s terms, is about connecting opposites to reach a point where contradictions enhance each other to create true value.
Social infinity through centralised decentralisation
EWB-SA’s principal dilemma is to create a NPC that has no limit to the number of projects or programmes it can implement, yet is confined to a budget and a set small number of permanent employees. Such an organisation without borders could reach an endless number of people and could occupy an infinite number of volunteers. Social media has provided the key to enable this kind of social infinity. The strength of social media lies in its ability to create communities around core themes (James Hu). By creating a structured platform through which individuals can engage and express themselves in unique ways, social media has reconciled the dilemma of centralised decentralisation.
To create companies with social infinity, they should structure themselves for centralised decentralisation by empowering their volunteers/employees to turn ideas to actions. Borrowing from Simon Sinek’s TedTalk “How great leaders inspire action”, a simple way of imagining how this can work for a NPC is by considering its why, how and what drivers. Like social media, NPCs can gather people around core themes: volunteers share the why of their organisation (in this case EWB-SA) and buy into the ideology and vision. The how is a centralised platform that EWB-SA must provide. This includes training volunteers with the necessary skills to plan and evaluate, providing resources to implement and hosting events to build a volunteering community. If this platform exists, what EWB-SA does can become a decentralised activity governed by well equipped volunteers. Empowered volunteers that are allowed to operate flexibly to act where they see need and are connected can thus start to play an active role in extending the reach of EWB-SA. Instead of structuring EWB-SA for those we serve, this model takes a complete turn by creating it for those that serve.
Incentives will drive the social infinity model for social development
Once established, the benefit is that EWB-SA’s scope becomes greatly reduced. Why is the organisational DNA and what lies beyond the organisation’s immediate influence. Both of these questions thus require minimal input, so that the majority of activities can be devoted to creating a supportive platform that entrenches how volunteers engage and operate. The key to unlocking the potential of the how is the inter-connected grid of incentives various stakeholders represent to each other. Corporates, industry, government, municipalities, academia, students, professionals and citizens all have their role to play. By using this grid to remove barriers and provide the right pull for its stakeholders, EWB-SA is setting up a platform through which co-innovation can be driven. Discussed below are two of EWB-SA’s pilot initiatives that use incentives to remove barriers.
Having space to engage is a key element required to incubate ideas, however spaces dedicated to engineering innovation do not exist in South Africa. Traditionally engineers are quickly classified as withdrawn and anti-social, yet today’s young generation of engineering thinkers knows the value of networking. Consultants, contractors and clients want to meet each other to build relationships. First year students want to meet final years, final years are looking for connections to young professionals. Companies yet again need to identify the most suitable graduates to recruit into their businesses. Finally, to enhance their neglected image and reputation, engineers have to step into the public space to build trusting relationships with the people they are designing for. Fresh connections are not built in stale networks. EWB-SA, as a platform connecting engineers with each other and the public, is taking the lead in developing a physical space where new interactions can happen: a space for engineers, by engineers to re-energise an aging profession. By the way, this space just happens to sell great coffee.
Lack of experience and engineering judgement pose a further barrier to EWB-SA student volunteers. On a day-to-day basis universities struggle to teach their students practical ‘soft skills’. Team work, communication, self-management, project management and risk analysis are but a few of them. Students are required to do vacation work to learn some of these skills, but companies find themselves strained year on year trying to keep the mysterious “Generation Y” interested. Students have the time and desire to implement EWB-SA projects, but are caught in the demands of their curriculum and career aspirations. On the other end of the spectrum companies struggle to engage a pool of increasingly dissatisfied graduates focussed on sustainability, to fulfil their corporate responsibility commitments in a sensible manner and manage knowledge transfer between junior and senior engineers. EWB-SA has thus started to place student groups working on community development projects in companies where they have access to mentorship from professional engineers. The stakeholders involved are driven by different incentives, but the benefits are shared by all: students carry full responsibility for their projects while gaining insights into the engineering sector. Companies can record the mentorship hours as sensible CSI and skills development, improve knowledge transfer and market themselves to a young audience of potential employees. EWB-SA is able to deliver projects of a better quality while empowering its volunteers.
Conclusion
In a world that is increasingly uncertain, volatile and complex, the abilities to collaborate and co-innovate are necessary for survival and success. EWB-SA is taking advantage of both to harness social infinity and develop an organisation that can propel itself forward.
References
Trompenaars, Fons. “ The Dilemma resolution process.“ Brightest Young Minds, Johannesburg Stock Exchange, 28 May 2013
Sinek, Simon. “How great leaders inspire action.” TED Talk, May 2010, http://www.ted.com/talks/simon_sinek_how_great_leaders_inspire_action.html