Dear Colleagues,
An article by David Brooks titled "How to Leave a Mark” appears in today’s New York Times. Brooks discusses the phenomenon known as impact investing, investing in for-profit companies that succeed through social innovation.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/27/opinion/david-brooks-how-to-leave-a-mark.html
This has interesting implications for some of the projects and organisations that designers are developing. The challenge lies in finding ways for the small and exciting projects now under way to scale up, reaching a size that will interest investors. Even so, the article raises issues worth considering.
Brooks — who speaks of the “opposable mind” — has obviously been influenced by design thinking approaches.
From the opening paragraphs:
—snip—
The big debate during the 20th century was about the relationship between the market and the state. Both those institutions are now tarnished. The market is prone to devastating crashes and seems to be producing widening inequality. Government is gridlocked, sclerotic or captured by special interests. Government is an ever more rigid and ineffective tool to address market failures.
So over the past generation many of the most talented people on earth have tried to transform capitalism itself, to use the market to solve social problems. These are people with opposable minds: part profit-oriented and part purpose-oriented. They’ve created organizations that look a little like a business, a little like a social-service provider, and a little like a charity — or some mixture of the three.
—snip—
Best regards,
Ken
Ken Friedman, PhD, DSc (hc), FDRS | Editor-in-Chief | 设计 She Ji. The Journal of Design, Economics, and Innovation | Published by Elsevier in Cooperation with Tongji University Press | Launching in 2015
Chair Professor of Design Innovation Studies | College of Design and Innovation | Tongji University | Shanghai, China ||| University Distinguished Professor | Centre for Design Innovation | Swinburne University of Technology | Melbourne, Australia
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