“People with Passion can Change the World for the Better” — S. Jobs
Steve Jobs said the he believed, “People with passion can change the world for the better.” He built Apple to give them tools to help them to do this. My company was formed because we believe this same sentiment. We identified an opportunity to create a network of individuals and organizations from various walks of life and industries who could collaborate inside a framework that would systematize positive change.
That’s kind of a complex sentence. Let me break it down.
Network of individuals and organizations: We build a social network, but with a focus on problem solving. Furthermore, your contributions to this network are, by default, kept public, but, if you pay, you can make your contributions private. This allows companies to retain their trade secrets and intellectual property. However, some innovations benefit even the inventor if they are shared freely. For other innovations, there is no commercial need to own them, or the social good may vastly outweigh the commercial need. For instance, if someone were to come up with a way to get clean water to the entire Ethiopian population, why not share this? In addition, the crowd of people who are using doGood will constantly be publicly posting new problems and innovative solutions that organizations using doGood could see, then bring in-house and build on to create new products and services — all the while engaging the crowd to ensure that what they will be bring to market will be well received.
From various walks of life and industries: Why is this important? Because many of the problems that we are facing today are so complex that no one organization, government, or even country can solve them alone. For these problems there is no silver bullet. To solve these problems, we will need to cross pollinate ideas and competencies from diverse groups or people.
Collaborate inside a framework: The framework that doGood provides is based on design thinking, open innovation, and lean startup principles. This framework involves a set of already integrated applications with the following capabilities:
o It allows people to define problems, their sub-problems, and potential solutions, and to show the inter-relationships between these through a collaborative visualization tool.
o It allows teams to be formed to create concrete solutions, and provides those teams:
- Tools to create crowdfunding campaigns (whether for profit or non-profit),
- Lean startup tools such as the business model canvas, kan ban systems, and analytics dashboards to ensure efficient progress towards a goal and to facilitate engagement between funder and funded (including Blockchain-based governance of lean startup activities),
- The ability to post jobs and search for people who would be a great fit for your team,
- Various other tools that teams can use ensure facilitate their work: Blogging, communication tools, and the ability to start or participate in contests.
Systematize positive change: As the name indicates, doGood is about making a positive difference. To use another Steve Jobs phrase, “making a dent in the universe” is difficult. We felt there was an opportunity to make that easier by providing a toolset that would give everyone a system to work within that would expedite change, and allow them to build off of each other’s work.
The system we built enables all of the above.
The framework is equally as applicable at the organizational level as it is at the inter-organizational worldwide level. For a given organization:
· It can be used for the development of a new version of a product.
· It can help to break apart the various aspects of the market and business that need to be defined, dissected, and tested.
For the worldwide level:
· It can be used to pick apart hugely complex problems like climate change or poverty, enable team formation, collaboration, and funding, and systematically solve them.
To find out more about what we’re doing, check us out at dogood.io.