CSI [hearts] Lagos

I met Femi Longe in Gdansk, Poland in November as part of the Social Innovation Exchange “winter school”.  We made a quick connection owing to our shared interest in the practice of social innovation and our desire to facilitate social impact at the local level. Yesterday, I had a chance to Skype with Femi and a couple of his colleagues at the Nigeria Co-Creation Hub.

I was totally knocked out by the work they are doing. While they’ve only been open for a few months, they’re building on global practices and their own inventiveness to great effect. In short, CC Hub is a coworking space. But coworking represents only a fraction of what they do. Really, the goal of the CC Hub is to accelerate social innovation in Lagos and across Nigeria. They running an “open living lab” to convene actors around pressing social challenges, offering a set of incubation services to social entrepreneurs with promising projects, and developing a social innovation fund to support the emergence of new ideas.

Among the many things I admire about their approach is their creativity in revenue streams. Given the relative economic and cultural context in Lagos, the coworking side of the business will only cover a small portion of operating costs. The CC Hub has been exploring different ways to bundle and sell their skills and community to corporate and philanthropic audiences. For example, they’ve been doing strategic innovation research and consulting for corporate partners. Sometimes this is the direct delivery of service by the staff of CC Hub and other times they are enlisting their members in the process, acting as a gateway to Lagos’ progressive entrepreneurial community.  They’re also doing market research, service/product development testing and facilitation on behalf of clients. Interestingly, they are also stewarding ‘innovation fund portfolios’ on behalf of larger funders that don’t have local capacity or expertise, accelerating the impact of these investments while taking a portion for administrative costs.

What’s most interesting, however, are not the differences between CC Hub and our own experiences at CSI, but the similarities. Our models and contexts are vastly different. Yet CSI arrives in 2012 with a refreshed commitment to accelerating social impact. Our efforts will be inward focussed, leveraging and propelling the work of our members. And so, like the CC Hub in Nigeria, we’re keen to explore how we can harness the untapped potential of our local communities to make local and global impact.  We’re also just starting to explore how our members’ extraordinary skills could be leveraged by external organizations. We’ve thought about this in the context of the CSI Design Common and also been inspired by some of the early thinking of The Hub Zurich.

We plan to keep in touch with Femi and his colleagues so we can continue to share and learn from each other. With a common commitment to local context and the potential of people-powered change, there is a basis of shared values that bodes well for ongoing collaboration.

Link: http://socialinnovation.ca/community/buzz/csi-hearts-lagos

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