Catalyzing a Social R&D Ecosystem:

Phase 5 — Setting foundations for growth

Author’s Note:

This is part two of a three-part series that captures some final reflections from the Social R&D Fellowship’s multi-year effort to jumpstart a network of supports for social purpose organization’s practicing research and development (R&D).

Why does Social R&D matter? Look no further than our current situation. COVID-19 is forcing shifts across the social impact sector. From the modest shifts like re-jigging services to respect physical distancing, and bringing whole institutions online; to the major shifts like waves of non-profit closures due to lost revenues, and amplification of existing social and economic inequalities.

In moments like these the ability to respond is deeply connected to capacities for the discovery and development of new program-, service-, and operating-models.

The Fellowship was originally hosted by Social Innovation Generation (2015–2018), and then McConnell Foundation and Community Foundations of Canada (2018–fall 2019). The Fellowship’s work began with the Social R&D Declaration to Action (2014) and ended with the launch of the Investment Readiness Program Social R&D Ecosystem Mobilization Initiative (2019).

Part one focused on how the Fellowship deepened bonds across practitioners and funders during turbulent times. This post explores some of the pieces that were put in place to help grow Social R&D work beyond the early adopters.

Phase 5: Positioning the Social R&D ecosystem for growth

“…it is through R&D that new ideas are reliably and purposefully developed.”

Max Blouw

Historically seen as a luxury or something that charities and non-profits did quietly, by the summer of 2018 R&D was now seen as a legitimate activity to increase the social impact sector’s ability to respond to shifts in communities’ needs and to accelerate improvements in outcomes. The momentum built and held through Phases 1 to 4 of the Social R&D ecosystem development work was a contributing factor to this change in attitudes¹.

Given the progress to date, this last phase of the work was all about leveraging the change in attitudes to accelerate the growth of Social R&D work beyond the early adopters. Practically, this looked like:

1. Equipping practitioners and intermediaries with some basic information and tools to deepen their understanding of R&D fundamentals,
2. Doubling down our support for institutions keen to take a leadership role in increasing social mission R&D activity beyond early adopters, and
3. In the spirit of practicing what we preached, we protected time and resources to explore new ways to maximize the impact of the Social R&D work already happening across the country.

With the backing of the Social R&D Community²; 1st class advice on how to execute the work from folks like Ian Capstick, Tim Draimin, Renuka Kher, Sean Lowrie, Sarah Schulman, Maya Shankar, Andreas Souvaliotis, Jess Tomlin, and Vinod Rajasekaran; and the McConnell Foundation stepping up with a big investment, we got to work.

1. Equipping the sector with R&D capacity building… building blocks:

Coming out of Phase 4, we had the sense that a breakthrough in new funding for Social R&D work was possible. But it was also becoming clear that if there was a spike in funding there weren’t enough dedicated supports to help organizations deepen their R&D craft, and even fewer supports to help organizations set up an R&D practice and get started.

Some basic R&D capacity building supports were needed, targeting both individual practitioners as well as existing capacity building intermediaries across the sector. To get a sense of where to start, we kicked off this stream of the Fellowship’s work plan with a roundtable on Social R&D capacity building with Geoff Mulgan (former CEO of Nesta) .

Triangulating across insights from the roundtable, what the Social R&D Community was hearing on the ground, and a review of the literature drove us to develop the following pieces of learning infrastructure and bring them online:

i) A common point of reference

Social R&D Practices and Patterns v1.0 is the result of a year-long exercise to capture common features from the dedicated research and development work happening across members of the Social R&D Community

The contents of Social R&D Practices and Patterns v1.0 are based on the following:

• semi-structured interviews with Social R&D Community members, academics, and R&D staff from a range of sectors,
• desk research on R&D practices, terminology, and metrics (inclusive of social and other sectors), and
• pattern finding across reports that document Canada’s Social R&D and Social Innovation activity.

Despite different social change contexts or “innovation” method(s) used, there were some key activities that aligned across practitioners and their organizations. The intent of Practices and Patterns v1.0 was to give practitioners, policymakers, funders, and really the sector as a whole, a more granular point of reference to discuss Social R&D work (e.g. what can it look like, what it is not, how a range of organizations do it, how to build capacity for it, it’s relationship to other terms like Social Innovation/Social Labs/ResearchToAction, how to fund it, etc.).

As Canada’s social impact sector’s experience with R&D grows, I’m hopeful that new revisions of this document emerge.

ii) A front door

SocialRD.org is a central place to welcome practitioners into a bigger community focused on i) peer learning and ii) strengthening the Social R&D field. It offers context for the ecosystem development work to date, a repository of the reports that have been generated to explore the characteristics of social mission R&D and what’s needed to grow the practice across Canada, and an inventory of vetted supports for building one’s R&D craft.

N.B. With the launch of the Investment Readiness Program Social R&D Ecosystem Mobilization Initiative, Social Innovation Canada has become an additional entry point to grow the practitioner community: https://sicanada.org/social-rd/

iii) A toolbox for capacity builders

Realizing that there were a number of possible R&D capacity builders across the country, we initiated a research study to uncover key ingredients for honing strong Social R&D practices.

This study was a collaboration between the Fellowship and researchers at McGill University, facilitated by the Mitacs³ program. The study included four streams:

• a scan of the literature and existing capacity building supports,
• a needs survey,
• structured interviews with existing R&D capacity builders, and
• field observations.

The hope is that this new evidence will empower capacity builders across the country to better support their partners’ efforts to uncover and develop breakthrough solutions.

(Part 3 of this blog series will share a summary of our findings but the database of capacity building supports, resourcing, and tools for Social R&D is already live.)

Fig. The Vivo Play Project is one of three case studies in Social R&D Practices and Patterns v1.0 that illustrate the 5 common elements observed in our research of what constitutes strong social mission R&D; the report also includes five vignettes of Social R&D in action.

2. Helping Ecosystem Champions Become Ecosystem Stewards:

For R&D activity to tip past the early adopters, a few important updates are needed across capacity building-, funding-, policy-, and advocacy and cooridination-institutions.

To accelerate some of these changes we were spending more time with executive, policy and program teams to i) help them to see where R&D principles and practices could apply across their own operations, and ii) help them build new programs, and/or retool existing programs, to maximize their contributions to the Social R&D ecosystem.

This part of our work plan was really an extension of our deeper engagement with a few key institutions, described previously in Phase 4: Holding Ground.

This is what it looked like in practice:

• Supporting strategy — being available on demand to work with teams to bring evidence and practical experience from the Fellowship and Social R&D Community into organizational strategy,
• Supporting program design/modification — again, being available on demand to work with teams to bring evidence and practical experience into the design and/or modification of program architecture,
• Increasing complementarity — working with teams to identify areas where they could compliment the efforts of other funders, policymakers, and capacity builders,
• Aligning our work plan — tailoring the Fellowship’s work plan so that everything we built could be connected to efforts across key players in the sector, and
• Providing technical assistance — being a resource for the assessment of R&D related grant applications.

It was great to see Social R&D Community members doing the same kind of engagement with key actors in their regions and/or social change area.

As encouraging as these conversations were, they were insufficient to address a national challenge: there was no dedicated network of supports for social purpose organization-led R&D work, and there were no stable entities with an explicit Social R&D field building/ecosystem curation mandate.

We desperately needed an anchor to bring a more coherent enabling environment for Social R&D together. The Social Innovation/Social Finance Strategy process being led out of Employment and Social Development Canada was our best chance for a breakthrough, so the Fellowship continued to closely engage key players associated with this effort.

On the morning of March 19, 2019 we woke up to some good news:

The Social Finance Investment Readiness Program (IRP) is a $50M (over 2-years) investment to support social purpose organizations in building their capacity to design, launch, measure and scale social/cultural/environmental impact initiatives. Eligible activities include capacity building for things like research and development. The Community Foundations of Canada and the national network of Community Foundations, one of the long-time hosts of the Social R&D Fellowship, is one of the delivery partners for this program.

Given the importance of R&D to the creation of investment ready innovations, the IRP — Research and Development Ecosystem Initiative was launched in parallel by ESDC, McConnell Foundation, SI Canada and Innoweave to expand the field building work that started with the Social R&D Declaration to Action.

These two new investment have the potential to create a stable anchor for growing the Social R&D field across Canada. First, by dramatically boosting the amount of R&D activity happening across social purpose organizations (i.e. R&D supply); and second, by nudging strategic alignment between a number of funding institutions (i.e. R&D demand).

Between the capacity-building and ecosystem-building sides of the IRP program, it’s the first real opportunity in recent memory to lift the structural limit on R&D activity in the sector.

3. Uncovering new opportunities to leverage existing Social R&D activity:

We were optimistic that we could get this phase of the work right, but just in case, we explored other paths towards growing a critical mass of R&D activity and supports across the sector.

Here’s a snapshot of some of the more promising things that we were working on:

i) Cross-sector R&D Partnerships

Preoccupation: If R&D funding and capacity building for non-profits and charities increases, is there the talent and tools needed to fuel a jump in R&D activity?

To explore options for mitigating a talent and tools gap that could put a ceiling on the growth of social mission R&D activity in Canada, we worked with Dulcimer Labs - a member of the Social R&D Community - to explore options for tapping into the R&D infrastructure of other sectors.

Specifically, we explored the value-propositions necessary to structure R&D partnerships that reward both social purpose organizations as well as academia/private sectors.

Fig. Excerpt from the Social R&D Partnerships report. Find full report here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1HOV8McfMwcs5ji28vcCxwoa6p8B9gwUpjk85IvA6Vbw/edit#slide=id.g4f65d53e43_0_173

ii) Connecting Social R&D Insights to the Public Sector

Preoccupation: Social R&D work, even if modest in scale, can result in high-value insights and the discovery of promising solution opportunities. How can these insights/solution options inform government policy, programs and services so that the most people possible can benefit?

To dig into this question we spent time with Innovation and Transformation teams across the Government of Canada. Most of these conversations gravitated towards options for connecting the public sector with timely intelligence on i) “next-practices” to be supported and designed for, and ii) signals on why some interventions are working/not working.

Fig. A jam between the 2018 Social R&D Practice Gathering attendees and public sector Innovation and Transformation teams, hosted at Shopify by the Social R&D Fellowship and The Policy Community.

iii) Social R&D Community (Services)

Preoccupation: Whether it’s data science, social labs, ethnography, experimental design, etc., the Social R&D Community reflects a broad range of R&D methods being used across a variety of social change contexts. How could the sector better leverage this technical expertise and practical knowledge?

As part of the Fellowship’s 2018/2019 funding, we were responsible for the development of a Data Utilization learning program for Innoweave. The Data Utilization module, affectionately known as DU, was to help organizations move up the ladder from being data collectors for reporting purposes towards being intentional data users, be it for informing strategy or driving continuous improvement. Ultimately, we partnered with three members of the Social R&D Community — Code for Canada, Open North, and Powered by Data given their deep technical knowledge, and their experience helping front-line organizations increase their digital capacity — for an 8-month process to uncover key design features, co-develop, test and then refine this new learning module.

The results were compelling. If you’re looking to develop relevant, effective and scalable R&D capacity building supports for the sector, definitely look to the Social R&D Community for support.

Fig. An excerpt from the module hand-over deck to Innoweave. The deck included key insights from the R&D process, including a number of data utilization resources for non-profits uncovered that were captured here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1CpTNGlmCefNlHMyxNFOsPHh0souoYStipDgCXyTxzDY/edit#gid=0

iv) Social R&D Primer (for funders and policymakers)

Preoccupation: Given the significant influence that funders and policymakers have on the sectors’ operating environment, to be sustainable, any gains made in social purpose organization R&D capacity would need to be met with shifts in how institutions fund, govern, and evaluate social mission R&D work. Not expecting a wave of institutions to make these changes overnight, we were curious on how to at least help these organizations boost their literacy in R&D and innovation systems.

Reflecting on the Fellowship’s experience working with executive teams and program managers, there were definitely a few lessons that were a gateway to broader understanding and more nuanced thinking (e.g. strong R&D relies on multiple methods like blending deep ethnography with social labs, or philosophy and data science, etc.).

Given early signals from the Mitacs research project on capacity building as well as the Data Utilization learning program work, it seemed that these foundational R&D lessons can be deployed over a variety of learning formats.

This is good news: it means that whether you’re a funder, policymaker, or service provider, it’s possible to increase your R&D readiness in low-touch, high retention ways!

Fig. Slide from a mock-up of a Social R&D Bootcamp. The Bootcamp was envisioned as an introduction to build sufficient R&D literacy to allow for more in-depth learning experiences (be they lecture-style or experiential).

v) Micro-Social R&D Ecosystems

Preoccupation: There has been increased attention over the past few years on how to craft innovation systems that speed up the realization of specific economic, social or environmental outcomes or “missions”. A key component of these innovation systems is R&D infrastructure. So how might we distil the lessons from the Fellowship’s 4-years into a model for growing R&D infrastructure across social and environmental issues, be it increasing Canadians’ adoption of energy efficient products or halting the rise of social isolation for seniors?⁴

We worked on this thought experiment throughout the duration of Phase 5, landing on a model for establishing “micro-” Social R&D ecosystems: distributed R&D supports, woven across a network of organizations with a shared focus on addressing a specific challenge.

As R&D is a team sport, the model focuses on building the capacity of existing intermediaries to support R&D work, working with sector leaders to create the right enabling conditions, plugging holes in R&D infrastructure via cross-sectoral partnerships and co-production between practitioners and funders/policymakers, and supporting the experiential learning of social purpose organization staff.

Early signals suggested that this approach can work if there is a curated network of service providers, an organized peer-learning community, and anchor institutions that are hungry to develop their R&D capacity.

I’m lucky to have landed in a role where I have a mandate to test some elements of this approach.

Fig. A slide from an early Phase 5 deck that describes how some key lessons from the Fellowship could be applied to accelerate R&D work within targeted social or environmental missions.

Now where?

Over its four years, the Social R&D Fellowship was exposed to many compelling R&D practices across the social impact sector in Canada and abroad. This final phase of our work was an attempt to lay some foundations that would enable even more social purpose organizations to go after the next generation of solutions that our communities need.

A big thank you to McConnell, Community Foundations of Canada, the SI/SF Co-Creation Steering Group, and the Social R&D Community for their support during this phase of the work. You were relentless in making the case that R&D is as important for the social impact sector as it is for every other sector.

The Fellowship has now passed the torch to the IRP-Social R&D Ecosystem Initiative, so you can connect with the folks at McConnell, Innoweave, and Social Innovation Canada to stay on top of this next phase in Canada’s Social R&D journey.

Preview of part three:

• Summary of research findings from the Mitacs study on strong approaches for growing R&D capacity within social purpose organizations
• Findings include some juicy revelations like previous waves of “Social R&D” policy and funding measures in the US that lead to some significant advancements in educational outcomes in the 60s; or that change management capacities need to be intertwined with Social R&D capacities.

Footnotes:

[1] Here are the other posts that capture the last 4-years of the Social R&D Fellowship’s work:

• Phase 1: Following Curiosity and Testing the Waters
• Phase 2: Conducting a positive deviance inquiry and fostering practitioner peer coaching and learning
• Phase 3: Seeding value of R&D in public policy community, grantmaking community, and deepening the practitioner peer community
• Phase 4: Holding Ground
• Phase 5: Positioning the Social R&D ecosystem for growth
• Some new evidence: growing social mission R&D beyond the early adopters

[2] During the Fellowship’s tenure, the Social R&D Community included active alumni from the 2016, 2017, and 2018 Social R&D Practice Gathering. The Community was curated with shared objectives of i) improving members’ R&D craft and ii) creating the conditions for R&D to grow and thrive in the sector. Initially curated by the Social R&D Fellowship, the Social R&D Community is now curated by Social Innovation Canada as part of the IRP — Research and Development Ecosystem Mobilization Initiative.

[3] Mitacs is a Canadian nonprofit organization that facilitates research partnerships between post-secondary institutions and other sectors to give graduate students real world experience and to help businesses and nonprofits reach their goals. This study benefited from the Mitacs Accelerate internship program.

[4] How to embed Social R&D infrastructure within industrial and economic activities is the flip side of this question. As a probable feature of an economic system that gravitates towards ‘inclusive growth’, this was likely the more important question to follow, but it was too far out of our practical experience.