World Vision Social Innovation Challenge

Project Status: Completed; Category: Co-Create Scalable Solutions; Countries: US, Canada, Philippines;

Project Summary

The World Vision Social Innovation Challenge was an open innovation platform that curated real-life social challenges from World Vision communities in the field and packaging them as impact challenges for global solution designers to co-create solutions with the community members.

Background

The Social Innovation Challenge (SIC) is an example of a combinatorial effort to build a scalable platform based on existing resources. Asia P3 Hub conceptualized the idea of an end-to-end platform to leverage on the collective power of crowdsourcing. Coincidentally, World Vision Canada started the Social Innovation Challenge 3 years ago (in 2016). WV Canada engaged social impact innovators from top universities in the country, and looked to further develop on this initiative they built. Asia P3 Hub helped to scale the initiative up by:

- sourcing for challenge statements directly from the communities in Philippines
- allowing the community members to help shortlist feasible solutions, and provide feedback to the shortlisted teams on how to improve on their solution
- working on an action plan to engage local partners to help implement the winning solution
- turn the SIC into a multi-challenge, multi-country initiative

Process

The first priority was for us to empower the field officers to think like solution designers. We provided design thinking methodology training to the WV staff working closest to the field.

Results

The project resulted in more than 60 teams engaged across US, Canada and Philippines in 2019. The winning teams will be implementing their solutions for the 4 challenges in 2020. The SIC will also be launched in Ethiopia in 2020.

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