Webinar discussion with Karina LeBlanc, Executive Director of UNB's Pond-Deshpande Centre (PDC) and Jakob Wildman-Sisk, Social Ideas Enabler at PDC.
Karina and Jakob share their experience bringing New Brunswick's first public social innovation lab to life—an initiative that leverages multi-sector expertise in order to understand the region's most pressing challenges and co-create solutions for them. They discuss the key partnerships they formed and their learnings along the way.
4. Complex Problems
Complicated Problem
• Clear Problem
• Clear Solution
• Unclear process
• Unclear Problem
• Unclear Solution
• Unclear Process
Complex Problem
Emergent
Influence
Information
Flow
Karina – Introduction to the PDC
Karina and Jake – introduce selves and what we’re going to talk about today.
Karina
Speak to the state of NB and the current conversation entrepreneurs, government, and community are having.
What are NB’s largest social problems? Without talking about “complexity”, highlight the major issues that are complex.
What are our current ways of addressing these problems? We create social problems as systems but try to solve them as individuals.
Jake
Karina
Jake
Jake
Jake and Karina - Developing a challenge question
Pose an example challenge question.
Ex. Of affordable housing
Jake - The system we are working in is:…
Map contributing factors, resources, players, and institutions
Map direct positive and negative correlations
Karina – To understand system, it needs direction and we need to know where it isn’t working. This is why we need to draw in users of the system (like the homelessness) to identify intervention points.
Jake - Identify leverage points. Put the least amount of effort for the greatest potential for impact.
Jake - Design solutions at promising intervention points
Karina - Co-create solutions
Karina - Scale successful interventions, drop unsuccessful interventions
Open Innovation – Jake
Entrepreneurial Rigor to Public Challenges – Karina
Evidence-Based Decision Making – Jake
Jake – I can touch on these and you can add any you think might be important? This should lead you into the closing, which I think you’d be best fit to take on.
Karina
Research Symposium – Connecting Housing researchers with users of the content to develop a long-term in-time research agenda.
Five-day Sprint – Launching 2-6 new labs around issues like food security, immigration and employment, and education reform.
Conference Space – Keeping the lab framework a part of the conversation by including it in all major conferences (Govmaker, Ideas Festival, The Dialogue, Housing).