Society of Owners Pitch Outline V.1
Today I will be speaking to you about the Cooperative Agency for Social Innovation experiment, Society of Owners. The cooperative will be a business that provides value for its member-owners and their clients. In partnership with SMartDE eG, the freelancers cooperative, we will launch our pilot on February 16th/23rd 2019.
I would like to start with an experience I had in 2017 while I was teaching at the Design Akademie Berlin I took my students to a conference for social innovation held by Hitachi the technology and hardware producer.
What I saw was appalling but only one other rubble rouser was in attendance asking hard questions about how Hitachi’s interpretation of social innovation as technologically enhanced policing might be problematic.
Then last year, 2018, I attended the Social Innovation Summit which was held in Stuttgart. The conference description had a powerful call to action – engage in defining what social innovation would mean and become in Germany.
The conference opened strong and brought many engaging people together who spoke about social entrepreneurship. Very little discussion about defining the community of practice, the methods, or the aims took place during those 3 days.
Hitachi earns revenues of approximately 83.2 billion in a year, as they did in 2017 according to a report recently accessed on Statista, with their brand’s interpretation of social innovation. But at what cost to our social fabric and due to what skews in our economic policies and market assertions?
The Social Innovation Summit brought together #**** great business people and thinkers together who were charged and primed for action. But how might that energy have been better focused if there were a more clearly identifiable ‘social innovation’ definition for the attendees to grasp?
That’s what we aim to offer – a niche community of talented coaches, consultants, and trainers for a vast market of companies and agencies that seek fresh thinking on topics of the future or work, service design and innovation, and social justice and diversity topics.
So what is social innovation in the context of Society of Owners?
SoO will consider social innovation as applying innovation approaches, methods, and practices towards the aims of social and environmental sustainability.
This means applying the corporate innovation expertise and experience that we have towards other aims in addition to economic performance of our own and client businesses.
What value will we create you ask?
For various stakeholders the value will be different:
For member-owners, our first value creation will be healthier gig-economy working conditions through service provision and self-directed co-creation. (We will first design and consult for ourselves – a pursuit of cooperative principles)
For our clients, we will provide a boutique consulting and innovation program service that will out perform our competitors as a result of the time spent designing adaptive and learning organizational principles into our governance model(s). (This is a goal to achieve by end of year and will be the first organizational aim to pursue during the pilot year 2019 and grows out of the creation of shared value model from the Stanford Social Innovation Review community)
So far we are #** individuals sustaining ourselves as freelancers. With an investment of 250,000 Euros we can develop well researched and defined proposals and plans for the following long-term product goals:
1.) The SCE EU-wide Cooperative Business Registration
A.) Need to identify best geographic location for headquarters location based on economic and policy analyses
2.) A cooperative business technology suite
A.) Need to design and test digital service environment needed for decentralized cooperative function based on service design and UX design approaches
3.) A cooperatively owned office space
A.) Need to appropriately scope properties in high-interest locations based on strategic growth plan in locales with demand for our services and supply of appropriately skilled professionals
30,000 Euros to get SCE Registration requirements (estimated 5,000 in legal expense with that process)
50,000 Euros to do a design sprint on digital platform design
3,000,000 Euros to secure a property on behalf of the cooperative
5,000 Euros to do the crowdfunding (mid-production video and vision) before third quarter of 2019.
Goal for crowdfunding: 35,000 Euro to register SCE
50,000 Euros to develop a strong service overview of the cooperative suite platform and service model experience media to be completed until 2020.
Goal for funding: 5,000,000 Euro to develop enterprise ready platform product for European English language cooperatives