Leading Innovation for the Corporate Business Through Impact | CSI Insights Ep. 7

inherent in what CSI should be doing is getting, you know, instead of flinging solutions, first getting out there to understand what people need and want by really being there and then crafting solutions, trying them out and so forth.

Hello and welcome to Corporate Social Impact. Insights. I'm Siddharth Chatterjee from the AVPEN Academy team, and this is a series where we interview experts and leaders to learn about how we can amplify our contribution as practitioners in the corporate social impact space. Our conversation today is with Dr. Cj Meadows. Cj is an educator, author, speaker, coach, consultant, and entrepreneur and really a thought leader on tomorrow's innovation. Awarded as one of the top 10 women in IT Asia, Cj holds a doctorate in business administration from Harvard Business School. She co-founded and leads i2e, the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center at SP Jain School of Global Management. Cj is also on the board of directors of the Tiger Center, a social enterprise that works for tigers, people, and the environment. In this episode, we talk about 4 key ways in which impact can lead innovation in a corporate business. The conversation ranged from talking about disruption theory and design thinking to tigers and the price of trees. If you want to know why social impact and business innovation can really be two sides of the same coin, there's no better place to start than right here. With that, I hope you enjoy the conversation, and here's getting you right to it. Hi, Cj Meadows. It's wonderful to have you join us for this conversation. Could you get us started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do?

Thank you. I'm an odd conglomeration of practitioner and academic. I love to come up with new ideas and frameworks, but I really need to see an impact. Once I've done so. I lead an innovation center at SP Jain School of Global Management, and my background is doctorate in business, Harvard Business School. I was a technologist building technology for quite a while with Accenture, business strategy with Accenture, and as an entrepreneur for a couple of decades. Now I do a lot of design work and have some books out and lead corporate workshops in design.

That's such an interesting and diverse array of experiences, and I'm excited that—

That's one way to put it.

No, it's all positive, and I'm excited because I think we'll get to unpack some of those insights that you've had from going across these spaces when we talk about our topic today, which is kind of about how impact can lead innovation for the corporate business. And let's get started with that bold claim that we discussed earlier, that corporate social impact is way more than a cost center. It should be a strategy and innovation partner. Could you elaborate on that?

Absolutely. There's 4 basic approaches that CSI folks can take to not only explore new ideas, new value, but to really make them happen. And you do that by getting closer to the core of the business. Disruption, first of all. Disruption happens at the bottom of the market. And who's out there helping people at the bottom of the market? The CSI folks. Design thinking inherent in what CSI should be doing is getting, you know, instead of flinging solutions, first getting out there to understand what people need and want by really being there and then crafting solutions, trying them out and so forth. Greening. You know, a lot of CSI folks are very involved in green initiatives, and we've certainly got a lot of business value that can be built. It's not a matter of costing the business. It could be finding value and saving money for the business. And finally, something that we've been working with at the Tiger Center, an award-winning not-for-profit organization that I co-founded. Now I'm the executive chairman. We crafted something called the Golden Triangle Model, which integrates economy and ecology so that we can develop wisely.

Yeah, thanks so much for bringing that up. So there's so much in there in these 4 points. I wonder if we could go one at a time. So maybe we start with the first one that you mentioned, disruption. So what does that mean? What is disruption? How does that involve corporate social impact and corporate businesses?

Good questions. So first of all, disruption is something that shakes up a market or creates a new market. Let me give you an example from Nokia. Dear friend of mine, Jawahar Kanjilal, he led initiatives in innovation for Nokia and they said to him, okay, we need to enter and build up the Indian market because it's going to grow. And in fact, they were right. But don't just take what we offer around the world and take away a few features, scale it down, and fling a cheap thing at them. Go build them something appropriate from the ground up. And this was a brilliant approach, and that's exactly what he did. So Jawahar was— he was involved in integrating games and LAN and photos and printing and all kinds of stuff on the phone. But, you know, that doesn't necessarily help a poor farmer in rural Nigeria or India or China. So he went out with his team and understood more deeply what it is that people need and want in terms of a phone and the information and the services it can provide. What they came up with was a service called Life Tools. Which would provide real-time personalized information in a huge variety of languages in healthcare, agriculture, and a couple of other areas. So imagine being a poor farmer, you've afforded a phone, you got yourself a Nokia, and now you can see weather patterns, the price of what you're producing in the marketplace, what pests are coming over, what you should do about those pests, et cetera. It was such a complex system. As a matter of fact, they even put on micro insurance and they were going to charge for that until the regulators said, no, no, no, no, no, you're not a financial institution, you're a telecom company. And Jawahar turned right around and said, "Oh, okay, fine. The micro-insurance is free. We'll charge you for the information service." So imagine being a poor farmer in the middle of your fields, very far from the marketplace, and you can see what is this week's weather, what are the pests, what should you do about it, et cetera. This is also for health initiatives. At this week of your wife's pregnancy, Here's the kind of things that may happen and that you should think about. They reached 125 million subscribers in emerging markets pretty quickly. It has never been replicated. It was highly sophisticated. And this happened in like the '90s. Imagine what you could do today.

That's incredible. And to kind of zoom out a little bit, it seems like disruption is really about responding very specifically to a local problem and really understanding what the problem is and developing a new solution. So in that way, it's very innovative. You're not scaling a solution that's worked somewhere else and you're just bringing it to a new place. And, and I think what's really cool about that idea is that it really links impact areas with innovation very clearly for me, because the main thing for a business is to solve problems and innovate, but the most urgent problems are in social responsibility and sustainability and all of these kinds of fields. So if you're not solving these urgent problems, how else are you going to create new business and innovate?

Businesses can do things like data philanthropy. If you have data on the medical facilities available, medical supplies available, logistics, consumer behavior, and so forth, and when a crisis happens, you can pitch in with your desensitized data to save lives and also contribute that data to research efforts to fight illnesses. As a matter of fact, Bill Gates, who we all know loves tech, the fight against polio, he and his team particularly looked at the incidence of polio despite the fact that everybody was supposed to have had their immunization, and he found it along the border between two jurisdictions. One thought the other was doing it, the other thought this one was doing it. You can only realize that kind of stuff with good data analysis, right?

What's going on there is that there are also other ways to do philanthropy for a corporate organization. You don't always have to be a grantmaker or support initiatives on the ground. You've got resources. That can help understand these very particular problems. For example, data, which a lot of organizations have, that can be an incredibly powerful way to contribute to problem solving. Let's maybe shift over to the second kind of argument for Impact being an innovation center for your business, which is through design thinking. Design thinking being an approach, which I think you'd be best to tell us about.

Disruption and design thinking do have an overlap, a very clear one. And to go back to data for a moment, Forbes called data science and design thinking the new power couple because data analysis can help you pinpoint problems, but it won't tell you the answer. It'll tell you that patients are not coming back for the follow-up visits, but it won't tell you why. You need actual humanoids to go to the situation and investigate what's going— really going on, watch people, ask questions, etc. So in terms of the intersection between disruption and design thinking, looking for parts of the market that are ripe for disruption, and usually it's at the bottom where customers can't afford what's being offered, or they're being overserved, overcharged for what they really need and want. If you then send design thinkers out to understand what people do really need and want, or the, in disruption speak, job to be done, then you can come up with whole new markets, whole new products, services, and experiences that the team can design, prototype, and once they've got it right, launch at a big scale.

Right. If you could explain this a little bit more, what is design thinking, and do you have an example where this has actually come into play?

Absolutely. Well, you know, there's actually research on this. Believe it or not, business professors actually do a lot of research on stuff. And one question is, eh, does design thinking really work? Should I really be doing this? Funny enough, research shows that Firms that deeply immerse themselves in design thinking and take that approach to doing business are on average, they have 3 times the operating income growth, twice the return on assets, anywhere from 60 to nearly twice the return to shareholders. It creates value, real business value. Another interesting thing is from Strategy& that they studied the most innovative firms in the world. Said, okay, well, what's the best approach for innovating? Seeking new needs, reading the market, coming in second, understanding trends, so forth, or investing in technology? Funny enough, the need seekers financially outperformed the rest. So it provides business value. We know that there's tons of examples all over the media. What may not be as well publicized are some of the CSI design thinking sort of examples. One of my favorites is from an international development bank who shall go nameless. Sorry, I don't want to tick people off here, but it's an example of when they did not use design thinking. They set aside a budget, multimillion-dollar budget. Because they had seen women in a third world economy with big clay jars on the head, toting water around. And they thought, oh yeah, yeah, they need pipes and a water infrastructure so they don't have to do that. And they could make businesses, take care of their families, a whole lot, a lot of other things. So they put in this huge system. What do you think the women said to them?

I'm not sure actually, because to me as well, it sounds like That should work, but obviously haven't gone to the— Yeah.

They said, "How could you do this to us?" I said, "Well, look, this is a traditional conservative society, and the only time I get to go out of the house and see my friends and talk to them is when I go get the water. Now I'm stuck in the house all the time. Thanks a lot." And by the way, The bankers didn't realize that was their internet. So when you go out and get water with your friends or you're washing clothes and so forth, everybody shares what's going on in the community. I can find out, hey, what's the best approach to help my son because he's sick? Or by the way, I also need to get him a wife. Do you have a daughter? And oh God, my husband's trying to do this thing on the farm. Do you have the tool that we need, et cetera. So what had happened then? Funny enough, no money was allocated to maintaining the system. And the bankers learned their lesson and then said, okay, so the system is not working. What would be helpful for you? And they actually spent some time talking to the real people. And the women said, water filters. So often I bring the water home, there's something wrong with it, and it makes my whole family and myself sick, and then we need medical care and we haven't got any. By the way, we'd also like to learn how to make water filters. Maybe we could make a business and sell them. So they did that, right, using a design thinking approach. So again, development, there's some great lessons to be learned from data from a top-down approach. Don't forget the bottom-up. You have to be there sharing a life, immersing in your user's context.

Right. That's such a fascinating story. And if I could just understand the basic ethos around design thinking. So is the idea behind the approach that you go to the end user or the person who has the problem and you figure out from them what the solution is. So you co-create the solution. Is that right?

Exactly. Because you could get really lazy taking that approach and try to have your users do the designing. But funny enough, that's why you're paid the big bucks. That's your job. There are a variety of methodologies out there, but here's what they all have in common. 3 steps. Number 1, understand your users deeply. Find out what the real problems and desires are. In the middle, hey, let's get back to our workshop and actually design some new solutions. And frankly, the designers oftentimes have tech at the back of their head because they're from a different context, maybe like me, from a tech background, so we know what is possible, and that inspires us to create new possibilities for users. Step 3, you need to prototype, get feedback. You might co-create, or you might be refining with your users what you've created. And only after you've come up with a minimum viable product or service or experience that's profitable or otherwise value-creating, only then do you scale. You don't push your innovation team to scale before something's ready because that's a great way to lose many millions of dollars, right?

And so I think we're at this point now where we can kind of see the connection. So there's disruption and design thinking and I think the basic idea is in one sense you've got your innovation and strategy team of a corporate business is always trying to innovate, but you don't have to go around looking for problems. Your corporate social impact team, your sustainability team, they have lots of problems for you to try and see how you can solve in a way that's both impactful and innovative and value creating for your business. So one of the best ways to innovate is to look at impact. Great, I think we're in a good place to go to the third point, and I have taken my notes. So point 3, another argument for impact leading to innovation is greening. So what, what's that about?

Oh, a lot of people approach greening and ESG as being, again, a cost center. It's a cost, we have a requirement to report ESG efforts, etc. But can you use it to help the business? You know, one of my favorite examples is actually of a school that was, you know, kind of hurting financially. And oh no, they, they couldn't afford to keep up all the greenery around, so they pave everything over and make a car park. And you know, the building is concrete and all that kind of stuff. After a while, under the burden of huge aircon costs and the fact that they have no place for kids to play and everybody's stressed out now. You know, the kopok started to crack up and they were going to replace it and they brought in an architect to help with the engineering and so forth. It happened to be a green architect. And he said, well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. What if you just don't replace it? What if you get rid of it? What if you actually planted green spaces and trees all around the building and also created green spaces and playgrounds for the kids to play in? Do you know what that might do to your aircon costs? They discussed it, they budgeted for it, they did it, they looked at the results, and wow, aircon costs went way down. The cost of gardening and installing all this green infrastructure was a little bump up, but overall it was cheaper to operate green. If you look at factories, same thing comes through. What is waste from your factory often enough is a byproduct that you can use, or it shows that there are inefficiencies in your production system that you really should address. And operate better.

So what I'm hearing is there are win-win solutions between sustainability and business, and they're all around you. So you have to look out for them, and you have to— it's again that perspective shift going from looking at sustainability, social responsibility as an obligation, which is— it's easy to do that because it started as a reporting obligation for many corporate businesses, but to change that from obligation to looking at it as an opportunity for innovation. Another example I think you'd mentioned is to do with the price of trees, which I find intriguing. So could you go into that?

Absolutely. This was a project that was done in the Tiger Center. Our managing director, he became the head of a task force that was commissioned by the Supreme Court in India for a case in which 356 heritage trees, meaning at least 80 years old, were scheduled to be cut down for an infrastructure project. And the Chief Justice at the time said, well, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, is this really a smart thing for us to do? What's the value of the infrastructure project? And what is actually the value of the trees? So traditionally, they had looked at the timber value of the trees when making these decisions. Not the oxygen, not the bio nutrients, not the climate regulation, not any of the other things that trees actually do. When the task force came back, they found that a tree economically is worth about $911 US per year of the tree's life. So some heritage trees, the really old ones, are worth $122,000 each. So they also said, look, if you have to cut down a tree, you're not going to plant 5. You need to plant an appropriate number for the crown size. So it could be 10, it could be 50. And there are new technologies out there to move even mature trees. And why aren't we using old railway lines? Why aren't we using waterways? Why can't we divert? And why can't we use these heritage trees for ecotourism, etc., etc.? So when economists and ecologists start to work together, really good things happen that benefit both.

That's very interesting. And I think working together is a great segue into our 4th point. So we have deception, design thinking, meaning. 4th point is the golden triangle. What's the golden triangle?

So where we are on the edge of the Kana Nature Reserve, we've got tigers. And between 1900 and 1972, over 97% of the world's tigers disappeared, as well as over 93% of their habitat. So we wanted to do something for tigers. But Project Tiger, begun by Indira Gandhi, was quite right. Instead of following tigers around with a babysitter and a gun to protect it from poachers, how about you protect the environment and let them repopulate and survive and thrive? But when we spoke to the forest officials wanting to know, how can we help? They educated us and said, we're pretty good on guns training and manpower. How about you help the people who live around the forest who really are the best guardians of the forest? And we realized that, you know, we talked to people and spent time with them, of course, very design thinking. And we found, yeah, what do they need? Number 1, a way to learn, earn a living outside of the forest. Number 2, healthcare. Number 3, education. So we provide some of these benefits to people and they associate it with the Tiger Center and the tiger. Another thing that we do is we found out some particular instances where we could step in to help. For example, if a tiger kills a farmer's ox, Well, okay, you need two ox to pull the plow, and his one crop a year might be gone because the government is going to take so long to reimburse him. So we can step in with interim financing, and he can save a year of income, which is a big deal to a poor family. How about things like beekeeping? When people go into the forest for firewood, fodder, honey, and so forth. They sometimes stumble upon a tiger, if not a tiger, a cobra. We remove cobras from homes and relocate them. You don't have to kill them. We set up a beekeeping initiative so that people can earn a living again outside the forest. Leave it alone.

And I really wanted to go back to this idea because I loved it when you mentioned it earlier, is that was not the initial idea that you'd had with the Tiger Center. So I think some of the focus looking from the outside seemed to be that, you know, we've got these poachers, feels like a huge injustice, so let's go, let's equip the protection services with guns and more equipment. But when you actually went in design thinking fashion, one of the things that came out is that human-animal conflict and the community around that also relies on this ecosystem. Needs to be properly compensated and brought into the mission of protecting tigers and their habitat.

One of the times we were meeting with Forest Service, everything got canceled last minute because the Sariska disaster. So some years ago in Sariska Nature Reserve, all of their tigers, boom, gone overnight. And they investigated, they went to the community, Did anyone see anything? Mm-mm, nope, nope, sorry, didn't see anything. Okay, now have you ever lived in a small town? Everybody knows everything. And do you really think that no poacher went in asking for directions, asking about the tigers, buying food and water and so forth? I don't think that's so. So your chief guardian of the environment and frankly any community is the community. And if you're going to enter emerging markets and do rural business, where are you going to go for a police force? Where are you going to go for all the infrastructure you get in a lovely city? The community provides that. So businesses and community need to work together for that reason, in addition to the fact that these are your potential employees and your potential customers.

Right. The Tiger Center here is an example of the Golden Triangle. So what is the Golden Triangle?

It's embedded in our mission. We were created to help the tiger, help the environment, help the people. And frankly, you cannot help any one of them survive, let alone thrive, without helping the others. Another part of the model is the backdrop to that triangle. Whereby economic decisions and ecological decisions actually overlap. And whenever you make a decision, you need to take account of, unless you're in that fringe area of ecology that has no economic impact or economics that has no ecological impact. And I guarantee you that fringe is small.

So even the Golden Triangle perspective says that ecological development and economic development go hand in hand.

They do. And, you know, talk to anybody in China and ask, what does it mean, Olympic blue? When the Olympics went to China, the factories shut down so that the pollution level would drop for all of the tourists and all the press. And the sky was blue again. So anytime you talk to somebody from Shanghai and mention Olympic blue, that's what it is, those halcyon days during the Olympics when they actually had a blue sky and could breathe.

So I love that we've got this opportunity to really go through the ideas here. So we've got a series of arguments for why impact can be the innovation center or can be an innovation center for your business. We've got disruption, design thinking, greening, Golden Triangle, and I'm sure corporate social impact practitioners will be thrilled to hear that. In some ways, we are preaching to the choir in that sense, but they'd be thrilled to hear how important impact can be to their business. As a corporate social impact practitioner, how do you action these ideas and arguments to becoming a more integral part of your core business and of your company's objectives?

Part of it is the mindset. Of the CSI leaders themselves trying to make an impact outside the business. Well, you need to make an impact inside the business as well. I mean, one of our partners, Usha Sewing Schools, they sell sewing machines. And how would you grow the market for sewing machines? Hey, you could get hobbyists to get interested and buy more and give them online training, which they do. But how about this? Why not start sewing schools in villages so that the trainees who are certified can take the certificate to a bank and get a microloan to be a tailor? You've just helped somebody open a business and support their family. And what are they going to buy? Going to buy a sewing machine. So by now there's over 26,000 Usha Sewing Schools around India in over 17,000 villages. We host one.. And one of the things we do is we operate it with solar, clean energy, and water filters. And of course, that feeds back. Bushi got excited about it and said, hey, they should all operate that way. So now they're promoting that among all the 26,000. Basically, as a CSI practitioner, stop and ask, am I working towards impact outside or inside or both? It should be both. You need to become friends and partners with your company's Chief Strategy Officer and Chief Innovation Officer. Find them, be friends, develop synergies so that you can really help each other. Use the 4 approaches that we've talked about here to improve the business and develop new initiatives. You can make new markets, new, new products and services, and so forth. And you can even use design thinking to build support within the organization. As an example, a bank wanted to start using design thinking, and they weren't sure how much support they were going to get from the CEO and the board members. So what was the first project? A banking project used by the CEO and the board members. When they experienced it from the customer's point of view as customers, they got it. They really understood all the value that it provides. So that's an approach that you can take as well.

That's incredible. And I think it's so important to kind of understand that, that whole thing, because part of it is, as you said, Starting with the perspective that as a corporate social impact leader, you're actually an innovator as well for organization, right? So you can look at the business that you have, you can see how you can have impact there, and you can also see how your impact could create new business with—

and don't do it alone.

Partner.

Exactly. Go find somebody with data you need, go find somebody with tech that you need and don't have the resources to pay for Who else can, can provide the travel, the logistics for what you want to do, et cetera. Don't do it alone.

Yeah, it's lovely. And, you know, we, we say CSI, which is corporate social impact, but maybe it should be corporate social innovation as well.

And it's not just so impacting the social outside, it impacts the social inside. Today's best employees are mission-driven. Do they understand how your core mission is good for the world? Because that's what they want to work for. And can they participate in CSI activities and see the impact of what they did? That's the number one motivator of an employee. Not money, not title.

Impact. Amazing. Cj, I feel like we could continue to have this conversation for days. And I would love to, but I think it's a good point for us to kind of take this initial podcast episode to a close. And we'd love to keep in touch with you, both me and, and I think I'm speaking for some of the listeners here as well, and, and kind of know what you are gonna be up to and what you have been up to. So how can we, in closing, how can we learn more about the work that you do and how could we get in touch with you if we have some interesting ideas?

Oh, thank you for that. Yes, a plug. Yay. Connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm always shooting out new articles, workshops, all kinds of stuff. Head over to my website and I think your listeners are going to get that website address. There's a book webpage for the Sustainable Business book. There are other books. Go have a look. There's also a free multimedia intro to the materials and more. So check out the resources. My email is there. My WhatsApp is there. You can schedule me on Calendly. You can also go to I2E, the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center that I run at SP Jain School of Global Management and check out again, publications, uh, exec ed and more. And finally, you can head over to tigercenter.org and have a look at what we do and check out the, the Fundraising for Impact Investment page because we are fundraising for not only a profitable project, but one that will do so much good for so many. Do stay tuned also for my next book after the next one on impact and catalytic investing.

Amazing. And everything that you've mentioned that we can share as links, we will put on the podcast description. So please do check that out if you're listening. Cj Meadows, this has been an absolute pleasure. Thank you so much for joining us today.

So lovely to talk with you. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Corporate Social Impact Insights is part of the AVPN Academy Corporate Social Impact Center, which is established in partnership with Johnson Johnson, Miller Trust, and Visa. The center also includes self-paced modules, a library of content, and learning circles, which are a monthly series of small group discussions for corporate practitioners. Learn more at academy.avpn.asia. This is a monthly podcast series, and we hope you will tune in for another episode soon. Thank you for listening, and goodbye.