Purposeful Innovation for Good
“To be a company for good, we need to build purpose into the fabric of our business, such that the day-to-day operations and actions we perform reflect it.” This remark by Piyush Gupta, CEO of DBS Bank, speaks very much to a uniting ethos we have at PayPal, which is to strive to bring out an element of giving in all that we do. Below we highlight a recent initiative that marries PayPal innovation with charity and giving.
Background
Shortly after the Hack for Good program launched in April 2021, the PayPal Community Impact Team worked with the Innovation Ambassadors, who promote innovation and problem-solving across PayPal, to explore how we could drive ground-up innovation while doing good. In addition to the many altruistic, social good causes PayPal supports each year, we wanted to create more avenues for employees to innovate and amplify the impact that they are creating on a daily basis. Those conversations gave birth to the idea of “Innovation for Good” — a PayPal initiative that works to gather observed problems relevant to our business; bring in people from different teams to solve those problems with novel approaches, and then file patents and donate the monetary incentives to various charities of choice.
This program is designed to be a win-win: some colleagues want to contribute their expertise and domain knowledge for a good cause; some wish to file their first patent; others like exploring the topic of innovation or simply brainstorming together. The bottom line is that the diverse experience and skillsets that these participants bring provides many fresh perspectives to problems in different domains. All participants of this program would have agreed to pledge all monetary incentives of possible patent filing towards charities of their choice.
The Impact
Fast-forward six months later, we have submitted 16 ideas that solve different challenges observed in and out of our company. Solutions brainstormed range from novel ways to ease customer pain points, combat various cyber-attacks, and add efficiencies to data storage.
From the patent incentives, we have raised $30,000 thus far and we have allocated that towards a few non-profit organizations via PayPal’s Community Impact Campaign.
We also worked with Junior Achievement Singapore to develop and publish our book series for kids on Fintech. We printed over 2,000 copies in our first edition and distributed them to students and kids for free.
Program Structure
When we first launched this program, several participants raised concerns that they did not feel like innovative people, and that they did not have many ideas to bring to the table. After a couple of brainstorming sessions, we found that tons of ideas started streaming in from these same people once the problems were scoped and laid out. What we learned is the area where we struggled the most instead was in the initial identification and crafting of problems. What are good business and technology problems? Where can we find them? Have they already been worked on? How do we frame them? How should we scope them to an appropriate complexity level?
We decoupled the ideation process with the problem-identification stage to tackle this inertia. We created an internal portal for problem submission and detailed some guidelines on structuring a problem statement and supporting it with sufficient data and pain points. This problem portal focuses solely on crafting the problems and not on the solution. Submissions to this portal go into a problem bank, where the Innovation for Good Team then reviews weekly what to ideate on.
Today, the Innovation for Good Team is an open group for anyone who wishes to join. As a pilot, we rolled out this program in our Singapore office, and more recently, got our colleagues from the India offices join in.
We keep attendance very flexible for the meetings, so folks can pop by any week they want. No pressure or commitment is required. Sessions are kept to an hour and focus on problems from the problem bank — typically one from the participants present that day. We spend time understanding the problem with the help of the problem owner, and then we let everyone contribute to expanding the problem and hearing from their varied experiences. Then we spend time brainstorming on ideas. If the turnout is large, we split into smaller groups depending on which problem domains interest them. During the last 10 minutes, we give the different groups some airtime to share their ideas and for others to ask questions, provide feedback, and even build on each other’s ideas.
From there, in the days after the meeting, participants can continue to add ideas, and the problem owner will put together those ideas and make the submission. We go for quantity and try to make one weekly submission for starters. We continue the discussions for more significant problems for the subsequent one or two sessions.
Participants can choose to participate in these sessions actively or be observers. All inputs by participants are color-coded in a shared document so they can be credited as patent inventors should that submission go through the screening stages by our legal counsels.
Purpose Journey
Seeing colleagues from different teams come together to identify and solve problems is wonderful. We pitched it to the Global Innovation Ambassadors with our little project’s success, and plans are in-flight to scale this model. We hope this initiative will enrich our corporate purpose journey and allow us to make this world better with innovation.
On a personal level, the Ikigai concept of your “reason for being” sums it up. By aligning what you like to do, what you have to do, what you are good at doing, and what is needed to be done, we could be a force for good collectively.
