I am writing this series because I spent more than a decade on a journey of strategic innovation with one goal in mind: to end modern slavery by making it unprofitable. There are, of course, other approaches, but this was the one that resonated with me. As I often say, it takes all kinds to make a world. Here, I am consolidating what I learned in the pursuit of this goal for others to learn from. Who is this series for? People with an interest in technology whose main goal is impact rather than increasing shareholder value. What will it do? It should help you organize your thinking and efforts from the outset to produce something scalable and sustainable.
What I noticed when developing my own technological innovation for social impact was that the internet is rife with unmaintained, isolated tech tools for impact. They are hackathon projects, great ideas from nonprofits that never found purchase, and other brilliant ideas that donors lost interest in once they became stable and unsexy. These ideas all have one thing in common: they have not found an exit that optimizes for impact.
For my project, I believed that developing a proof of concept with philanthropic backing had a unique advantage in that it could demonstrate to both governments and businesses that a potentially scalable and repeatable solution existed–and permissive licensing could put it in anybody’s hands. But, what I found in the end was that our organization was not ready to support what I call the “Last Mile for Impact.” The tool worked in principle, and it served a clear business purpose, but the next steps strategically and technologically were not clear. My position was that the shortest path to impact was to integrate the model into existing platforms that were already widely in use, but I lacked the engineering background to bring it to the standards of commercial B2B SaaS software.
So, I joined a tech startup that was aligned with my idea, and I started learning. I spent years on a high-performing engineering team, working with brilliant colleagues. What I learned in that time were the key, pragmatic steps an organization would need to take to meet that commercial standard, and how to plan for it from the initial theory of change.