Brighton Dialogue-Social innovation and Tech innov

Good morning/ afternoon. Distinguish guests, Ladies and Gentlemen:

Thank IDS and CAAS for inviting us to join this dialogue and share the dynamics in China. I’d like to present our thinking, practice and experience of promoting Social Innovation. Later on, I will illustrate how Chinese social entrepreneurs have applied technology to improve social welfare.

10 years ago, together with several top tier business leaders and academic scholars, I established YouChange China Social Entrepreneur Foundation, short as YouChange Foundation. It’s a private and nation-wide foundation, aims at promoting comprehensive social innovations towards a more justice, efficient and sustainable society.

By R&D, experiment, funding, cooperation and advocacy, it carries on the following missions：Build a neo-philanthropy value chain; set up a social eco-system for change makers.

Since establishment, YouChange Foundation spent around 40 million US dollars to build the eco-system for social innovation from 3 aspects.

● 1st Research and Advocacy

We are the first foundation in China to advocate social innovation，social enterprises, social value investment and assessment, we translate books, host seminars, and provide trainings, also published the first China social impact investment report.

 In order to build the infrastructure for the field of social value investment, we initiate 3A on-line platform to evaluate the company’s social value. 

3A stands for Aim-Approach-Action.

In the system, we score businesses or investments by analyzing its

➢ Firstly, AIM- social drive and strategy,

➢ Secondly, APPROACH- innovation in business model and technology,

➢ Lastly, ACTION- impacts in aspects of economy, community and environment,

And overall, the consistency of 3As.

● 2nd Social Angel Investment

We used 3As to identify social change makers from startup Social Enterprises and NGOs, provided grants and various types of support to more than 260 founders of these organizations. Many of them got followed up funding and grew into social impact players in the field.

YouChange is called social angel due to our work of social innovation, incubation and investment, which has a leverage effect on the development of China's third sector and social innovation.

● 3rd Incubation

We incubated 16 social innovation programs during 10 years, through 3 steps:

➢ Find the right partners

➢ Set up goals and strategies together with them

➢ Provide seed funding and related resources, accompany them for long time.

Finally, those long term partners of YouChange became the key junctions of social value chain.

The most significant incubation of YouChange foundation is the establishment of China Alliance of Social Value Investment, short as CASVI. In order to mobilize more market forces to engage in social change, together with around 50 organizations from investment, finance, business, academics and NGOs, we build up this inclusive, cross-sector platform, to bridge the demand side and supply side of social value investment.

 In 2017, CASVI took the lead and rallied 68 experts, scholars from 42 Chinese and foreign institutions, jointly to develop the first social value ranking list for public companies in China. We call it “Outstanding social value ranking 99”. The evaluation model is based on our 3A assessment system, and the processing data is referenced and collected from top 300 listed companies of Shanghai and Shenzhen stock market.

This is the first ranking list by assessing social value based on quantifiable indicators. Also it is the world’s first analytical case based on relative comparison between social value on the stock market .

In our opinion, social innovation promote social progress and create maximum social values by the following ways:

➢ To identify  new demand or new issues

➢ To discover new resources

➢ To develop and implement new technologies and new model

➢ To promote cross-sector collaboration

With all these methods, we wish to achieve a fairness efficient and sustainable society.

Other Social Innovation Cases in China

With the rapid development of technology, especially the Internet, Social innovation today is more technical than at any time in history. At the same time, more and more technological innovation originates from the needs of social development and is completed by social cooperation.

Mobike is a bicycle sharing firm, who solves the last mile public transportation problem and reduces carbon emission in urban area. Equipped with locating device, intelligent lock and a smartphone application, users can unlock, track or even book a bike. When they finish the ride, they can just place it on roadside and pay the bill via cellphone.

Not only expanded into many cities in China, Mobike has also gone overseas to Singapore, UK and Thailand. It has distributed over 100,000 bikes in these countries by the end of August in 2017,

DADDY Lab crowdfunds from the consumers (especially parents) through WeChat Group to conduct professional tests on general commodities of children, and sells those products tested to be safe and of high quality in their online store. With the crowdfunding of 200,000 fans, Daddy Wei, the founder, and his team have tested over 100 products, including book cover, air purifier, pillow etc. The turnover of online store has reached 2 million RMB per month.

YouChange E-Commerce Training program utilized ICT to develop the capacity building model of e-commerce in impoverished regions. After 3 days online study, 2 days offline coaching and 6 months accompanied incubation, over 65% of the people can start an e-business or find a job in e-commerce field.

So far, around 12,000 people directly benefit from the program. Among them more than 80% are women, and 500 are returning young workers. Around 7,000 people started/continued their career in online store business after training. And their monthly income increased an average between 500-3,000 RMB.

● Water Drop Mutual Aid is an online community of more than 5.7 million members, where everyone shall pay a little amount of membership fee, so that he or she could get reimbursed for a large amount if a severe disease happened. The community has designed several plans for different kinds of health risk and people of all ages. Up to now, a total of 224 sick members have been compensated with more than 26 million yuan.