Launchpad learnings: the business of doing good

Opinion: Nicholas Robinson, corporate affairs general manager, Contact Energy

Akina's social enterprise accelerator Launchpad will come to an end next month. It will be the culmination of six months of hard work for eleven teams who have been focused on growing their businesses and addressing some of the biggest social and environmental problems facing our communities.

The Launchpad has been a unique experience for all involved, including for us at Contact. We entered into partnership with Akina because we wanted to invest in the potential of social enterprise as a means of helping our communities. We also saw the opportunity try something a little different; to work in a new way to develop our people, to share our knowledge, and to build a new kind of partnership through the Launchpad.
What we came up with was the Launchpad development programme for Contact staff. We put eleven of our people into Launchpad to lead the support teams charged with guiding and mentoring each team. While the programme hasn't quite wrapped up yet, I can already see the impact it's having on our people involved.

The opportunity for Contact people was to experience real learning in action. Working with their venture teams they're often at the heart of some hefty challenges in building a business from scratch and how this impacts the bigger picture. This means lots of reflection on their own style, constantly working on the relationships they have with the teams, being able to back themselves when there is ambiguity and solve problems together as a team - rather than them having to know all the answers! This means honest relationships and communication is constantly front of mind. In future we'll also continue to watch them bring back some great new ways of doing things, so at Contact we can be more agile, innovative and less corporate!

One of the themes coming through in the feedback is that social enterprise is different to traditional business. While many of the planning elements and the growth process remain the same, the way that decisions are made, the core values of the organisation, the principles underlying business processes, the pace and the interactions between the business functions and the social or environmental functions of the enterprises - they're different.

At the same time the way that social enterprises go about addressing social and environmental issues is also a different model to traditional community development approaches. The measures of success are not the regular metrics of profit and loss. It's 'doing good' in an integrated way, and I think it's this integrated approach taken by each team to the challenges that they see that has required them to develop the way that they have - and it can only be good to support this type of innovation.

One thing that strikes me in looking over the business models of the eleven enterprises is the inadequacy in the way we traditional businesses measure impact and outcomes - and this is where the biggest divergence of understanding between a regular enterprise and a social enterprise exists. While we in the business world can point to profit and loss, social enterprises need to account in both worlds, providing a balance sheet that includes financial sustainability but also factoring in the impacts they are making on social, cultural and environmental outcomes. It has been great for our people involved to try and bridge these two sets of outcomes as they help develop the business models of the various enterprises they are part of.

There is much work internationally on expanding the set of metrics used to measure business impact - such as blended value or shared value - and I can see that as social enterprises grow so too will the pressure increase on improving the ways that business - social or not - account for their overall sustainability.

We really want each of the eleven social enterprises to succeed. We love their ideas, and the way they are going about creating social change and impact. Ultimately, that's the reason we have put our people in to this programme - to help make that happen for each and every one of them. That's how we think we can help spread the impact of social enterprise in New Zealand.

To support that to happen, we've also sponsored a series of milestone awards, and also a prize of $20,000 to go towards a team chosen by the people as their favourite. From the 23rd of February to the 22nd of March everyone will have the opportunity to vote for their favourite team in the People's Choice competition being run on Element's website. So take a look at the impactful work each of these teams are doing and get voting, your voice could be the difference in helping to launch one of these teams off the ground and also support an emerging business model that will have a lasting impact on our future.