Emerging Model of
CollaborationImplications to Policy and Advocacy for
Social Innovation
Anthony Wong
Business Director, Policy Research and Advocacy
The Hong Kong Council of Social Service
Nov 2015
Recognize a social problem
Leverage NGO value premise, government’s policies and business entrepreneurial strategies and skills
Aggregate resources and resource persons
Create social values, ultimately achieve social change.
Problem-based Collaboration
Recognizing a Social Problem
It is not just about awareness and knowledge, but also,
perhaps more importantly, about understanding.
There lies also a problem of collaboration!!!
Govt
NGO
sector
Business
sector
This is not
where
innovation
comes from.
It is where it
starts!
Leveraging Strengths: The Theory
• Collaboration is more than working together.
Collaboration is innovation. And innovation requires extra
efforts.
Poverty…Multiple Understandings
Experiments at Princeton, Harvard, and the
University of Warwick
- low-income people who were primed to
think performed poorly on a series of
cognition tests, saddled with a mental
equivalent to losing an entire night’s sleep.
- poverty imposed a mental burden akin to
losing 13 IQ points, or comparable to the
cognitive difference that’s been observed
between chronic alcoholics and normal
adults.
- Being poor means “coping with not just a
shortfall of money, but also with a
concurrent shortfall of cognitive resources.”
- poor people who aren’t good with money
might also struggle to be good parents. The
two problems aren’t unconnected.
Government’s Answer
• Essentially, it has to be bottom-up, rather
than top-down. But how can a
government/policy support be bottom-up?
Urban Degeneration
• Urban Renewal Authority
• Statutory body
• Self-financed
• Used to market-driven
approach to urban renewal:
Property market
development
• Urban Renewal Authority’s
new strategy: rejuvenation
and revitalization
URA’s Strategy
• Introducing the “social” to rejuvenate the
community so as to balance the mainstream market
• Provision of space for civil society organizations or SEs
to help implement their renewal strategies
• Renovate historical buildings (4-storey) and invite the
Council, as an intermediary, to manage one of the
buildings by engaging SEs.
Aggregation….again!
• We were invited to submit proposal, based on a
framework broadly prescribed by them
• Proposal specifying our concept and approach,
laying down our plan on how each of the 4 floors
are to be used within the broad framework
• Calling for proposals from social innovators by us
• Selection and engagement of the social innovators to
implement their business ideas accordingly
We have a will and direction favoring collaboration
We don’t have necessary systems (legal and
institutional tools) to make collaboration
smooth, if possible at all
And that in turn may
discourage collaboration!
Policy Support: Challenges
• Government: Spirit strong, body weak! Market: Spirit weak, body strong!
• Outsourcing of Risks
• Public accountability
• Level playing field issue
• Resource allocation criteria and their operation
• Institutional risks
• Liabilities and contractual arrangement
• Administratively-incurred financial risks
• Maintaining mastery of power