The Social Impact Marketplace

The Social Impact Marketplace facilitates the deployment of entire cooperative value chains of job creating businesses to multiply job creation impact per dollar, and to make services like training the disadvantaged become sustainably self-funding.

Instead of a stand-alone business, statistically around 90% likely to fail, we multiply jobs by creating a chain of businesses likely to succeed. This is only one of the many synergies we use to multiply job creation and other impact.

We’ve found mathematical equations to describe this cooperation in computer software, so we can use computers to find these chains of businesses easily, as typically it’s far too complicated for humans to do. We call this computer program the “change engine”. Like Uber coordinates the interaction between taxi drivers, the dispatcher, and passengers, the Social Impact Marketplace then coordinates that cooperation between the participants required to launch the cooperative value chain.

We’ve also created a Universal Impact Metrics Framework that enables the job creation impact of each chain of businesses to be objectively compared so the chain with the most impact can be selected. After creating the businesses we then use this framework to measure the actual job creation or other impact and compare it to our projections, so our projections can be continuously improved.

In this way, the Social Impact Marketplace and the Universal Impact Metrics Framework work together in this “change engine” to turn poverty and other human suffering, into computer problems that can be reliably solved, where before these problems seemed insolvable.

This platform maximizes the probability of creating jobs enough to make it reliably achievable, magnifies that impact per donor dollar, and makes that impact sustainably self-funding once launched so it can serve the entire population. Phase I will target poverty alleviation through job creation. Later phases will deploy cooperative value chains that extend these benefits to include not only jobs, but other areas like access to affordable education and health care. Cooperative value chains can be designed to target any impact addressable through deployment of a product or service, or deployment of the businesses producing them, which includes virtually any social or economic impact.

All its components: cross subsidization, the support a healthy value chain provides to each business in it, and the capability of a healthy value chain to support scaling of the businesses in it, have case studies demonstrating they reliably promote the success of businesses, and/or scaling of businesses, which is a reliable means of creating and scaling jobs whose only intrinsic limit is market capacity. In addition, several well-respected international NGOs with expertise in the area, with whom we're partnering to develop a proposal for large scale deployment, have endorsed in writing the potential of this approach for transformative change.

Leveraging our research into the rules governing outcomes of collaboration, this platform orchestrates decentralized cooperation (decisions rest in the hands of participants most impacted by the outcomes), so outcomes are naturally balanced towards maximizing collective well-being. These rules help ensure decisions on which interventions are funded are less motivated by an administrator’s desire to avoid contravening policies in ways that could affect their livelihood, than by the desire to nurture ideas with the potential for transformative impact. This cooperation isn’t easily possible without the automation the platform provides. The beneficiaries are the poor in every country where this solution will be duplicated.

Through monitoring and evaluation of the enterprises funded through our Social Impact Marketplace platform. - Jobs Created

Through use of our Universal Impact Metrics Framework to model of the impact projected in the value chains deployed through the marketplace, and through use of this framework for measurement of actual impact through monitoring and evaluation. - Capacity to Drive Social, Economic, and Other Impact

Through modeling of projected increase in returns and decrease in risk for private capital through our marketplace's cooperative value chain approach, and measurement of the actual investment incentivized by these benefits. - Capacity to Fund Social Impact

Our “change engine” pattern is AI for social impact:

Enables participants to identify their targeted outcomes.

Uses the laws of cooperation and sharing of value to define potential collaborative actions capable of achieving those outcomes.

Defines a way to simulate outcomes of actions.

Defines a way to semantically compare actions by those projected outcomes.

Defines a way to select actions methodically where sufficient facts and reasoning frameworks exist.

Defines a way to use pattern-recogniztion to select outcomes where an adequate reasoning framework or sufficient facts don't exist.

Orchestrates the execution of those collaborative actions.

In our analysis human suffering is essentially a misalignment between the interests of those with the resources to drive change and those in need of it. This platform defines a methodical framework which engineers that alignment, beginning by measuring impact in terms that have intrinsic human meaning. When motivations are more correctly aligned with outcomes, well-being is optimized. Our approach essentially uses the rules governing the outcomes of collaboration to turn intractable challenges involving human suffering into optimization problems that can be reliably approached with technology.

Initially access to the platform in rural areas will be brokered by NGOs that we’re partnering with. Their access will be over the internet and mobile phones. Then as further decentralization features are built in (such as synchronization through replication), the platform will be accessable off-line in rural areas by these brokers as well. In later phases, our goals are to deploy value chains we’ve designed to dramatically reduce the cost of smart devices the rural poor can use to access this platform and to access medical, educational, financial inclusion, and other services.

The Social Impact Marketplace is a for-profit platform. We've also formed a consortium with several other organizations to develop a proposal for large-scale implementation of the first phase. This proposal leverages grant funding through impact bonds to raise a far larger amount of private capital to fund job creating agricultural and renewable energy value chains.

For subsequent phases, we've defined strategies that leverage a portion of the value created through this guaranteed impact "pay for success" approach to ensure governments can reliably service loans secured to finance those impact bonds. We've also defined strategies for private development organizations to leverage tax credits to secure financing that will allow them to essentially create their own grants to fund impact bonds. Both these approaches have the potential to fund deployment of job creating cooperative value chains at global scale.

In addition, we've architected value chains to achieve many of the SDGs globally, enough capacity to absorb this capital.

When this approach gains sufficient mind share it is designed to be self-sustaining. The value of this platform is the network, but building the cooperation required is time consuming and difficult with only the funding I've contributed. At the same time, funding organizations have narrowly defined agendas and restrictive policies that fund the same broken approaches, making it difficult for game changing innovations like this to gain the funding to undertake such efforts. All our work has been predominantly on a volunteer basis, which precludes attending conferences and other more efficient ways of building mind share that are all "pay for play". 

https://www.dropbox.com/s/ffyrx6pi7xtyvlf/The%20Social%20Impact%20Marketplace%20-%20Brochure%20-%20General%20v28.docx?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/j47ofgawqkpzicl/The%20Change%20Engine%20Summary%20v10.odp?dl=0

https://www.dropbox.com/s/i8e7u9dcihs68ph/Using%20the%20Rules%20Governing%20Outcomes%20of%20Collaboration%20to%20Scale%20Social%20Impact%20v6.pdf?dl=0

We have a potentially game changing solution that is lacking in exposure and hence mind share and funding. Gaining exposure has been slow, and time-consuming. It has cost little, but our time has been volunteered so it's been expensive for us. Furthermore the rules governing the outcomes of collaboration suggest this solution runs directly counter to the non-cooperating approaches that the increasingly centralized decision-making processes of donors are tending towards, which conversely, according to our model, put solutions to the challenges they seek to address even further out of reach. Solve’s challenge might be the answer for initial funding. And itsnetwork could potentially be a great asset in implementation.

SNV, Technoserve, Hand in Hand, Farm Africa, the World Bank, Agriprofocus, USAID-KAVES, Accenture, and several others. These have acknowledged the solution as potentially transformative. But all allocate money for specific programs. The don't support this kind of broad R&D.

None.