Time for disruptors with new ideas to help society’s failings
Transformational change in society requires new ideas and a willingness to fail, says .
‘If I had asked people what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.” So said Henry Ford after he built the first motor car.
While the idea of a faster horse does sound exhilarating, there are two important truths we can learn from this quote:
- Sometimes incremental improvements just aren’t good enough;
- Transformational ideas are difficult to imagine before they are created.
Never in history has this been more true than today.
Fuelled by the rapid pace of technological growth, we have seen almost every established industry around the world disrupted by new thinking and innovative approaches: The iPhone redefined the way we communicate; Airbnb transformed the experience of travelling: Amazon revolutionised the way we buy goods.
As we look at the challenges we face as a society, it is clear we urgently need to apply this same entrepreneurial approach for public benefit.
Homelessness, hospital waiting lists, fractured communities, and rising inequality are among many social issues that just refuse to go away.
Our teachers, gardaí, nurses, doctors, social workers, and speech therapists are already stretched to capacity.
These challenges constantly require additional resources at a time when resources are already extremely limited. Incremental improvements will not be good enough, we need transformational ideas.
Bringing about this kind of change isn’t easy. To do so requires a system that finds and nurtures new and innovative ideas.
For a number of reasons, this is difficult for any large institution like the Government to lead. These include:
- It’s high-risk: Backing truly innovative ideas at an early stage requires taking a chance on ideas that might fail. For every success story which is celebrated, there will be many failures. It’s difficult for elected representatives to take that kind of risk;
- It’s hard to disrupt yourself: Change requires disruption and it is challenging for a large, structured system to disrupt its own approaches. It is no accident Nokia did not invent the iPhone, that an established hotel chain did not create Airbnb, or that a horse-and-carriage company didn’t pioneer the motor car;
- The best ideas are widely distributed: We should not limit our source of new ideas to the people who happen to currently sit in positions of power. Great ideas often emerge from people who are closest to the problems in society, the people all around the country who see first hand what needs to be done.
As an entirely privately funded charity, Social Entrepreneurs Ireland is set up specifically to back new ideas.
Our funders understand there will be failures along the way.
This means we’re able to support new ideas at the early stages and help them to scale. We back the disruptors, the people who dare to see things differently.
Over the last 13 years, we have received thousands of ideas from the public, each one proposing a new way we could think about tackling social challenges.
These ideas look beyond the horizon of the current way of doing things and point to a brighter future. What is most inspiring is people aren’t just coming up with new ideas, they are working tirelessly to put them into action.
They use all of the resources at their disposal, they take risks, innovate, adapt, and stop at nothing to get their idea off the ground.
They use all the tools of the entrepreneur, not to make a profit, but to make Ireland better. We call these people social entrepreneurs.
We have proven that with the right supports, these social entrepreneurs have the potential to transform our society.
CoderDojo, which provides free computer coding classes for children, scaled to 63 countries around the world in just eight years.
Irish Community Rapid Response delivers professional pre-hospital A&E care directly to the site of emergencies throughout Ireland.
Founded in Cork, it has scaled rapidly and enlists more than 250 volunteer doctors working to save lives all over the country.
The success of FoodCloud, Pieta House, Women for Election, and Men’s Sheds provides further evidence that taking a risk on early-stage ideas can have a big impact.
It is important to stress this is not a critique of government or a replacement for the services we should expect to be provided by the State.
While the government might not be the first backer of these new ideas, they have a crucial role to play in further scaling and sustaining them once they are off the ground.
In this way, a new system is formed where new ideas, backed in the initial stages by private funding, complement and enhance the approaches that the government is taking.
We are looking for people across the country to come to us with innovative ideas to improve our society. What if a new idea could unite entire communities around the solutions to our biggest social issues?
What if we could use technology to solve a problem at a fraction of the cost? If these ideas are out there, we can’t let them go to waste.
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