Neil McLean: Last speaker in this morning, I had the pleasure to introduce someone I met in Edinburgh who was just inspired, Audrey, the Digital Minister from Taiwan.

Neil McLean: I’d love to hear what’s happened in the last year in the Taiwan context, so Audrey, please.

Audrey Tang: Hi, everyone. Really happy to share what’s happened in Taiwan for the past year. Just a quick refresher for people in the audience who wasn’t at Edinburgh. I am Audrey Tang, and I’m Digital Minister in charge of social innovation and youth engagement.

Audrey Tang: I got this job, because I helped Occupy in our parliament five years ago. Five years ago, there was a deliberate about a trade service agreement, and the MPs were on strike. Many people, mostly in their 20s, just occupied the parliament, totally nonviolently, and started doing deliberations the way that they would wish that the MPs would do.

Audrey Tang: Somewhat magically, over the course of three weeks, the 20 NGOs that supported it, many with leadership in their 60s and 70s, built this what we call intergenerational solidarity.

Audrey Tang: During those three weeks of conversations with deliberations online and offline, we managed to convince each other to settle on a common vision of what to do with the trade service agreement within the three weeks.

Audrey Tang: The best of things is that the head of the MP at the time just adopted the consensus from the young people. From that point onward, the cabinet started systematically recruiting people to serve as understudies.

Audrey Tang: The understudies to a few ministers, me included – I was still young at the time, I was 34 at that age – everybody was under 35 and served as reverse mentors, really, to the ministers. Now, starting from 2016, when Dr. Tsai Ing-wen became our president, she made it her campaign promise to start a cabinet-level youth council.

Audrey Tang: With all the 12 ministries participating in the Social Innovation National Action Plan, each of them will have two or so understudies that are really reverse mentors, and all of them are under 35 years old. For example, this is our National Day parade.

Audrey Tang: The National Day parade features a national champion, a world skill gold medalist in the middle, winner of car painting, I believe.

Audrey Tang: The reason why we’re featuring world skill champions, instead of just athletes, is because there was a cabinet-level meeting where the reverse mentor for the Ministry of Labor, Wei-Hsiang Huang (黃偉翔), raised the idea that we should feature them in our National Day parade from this year onward, so that everybody can learn the idea of skilled people as world champions, and also as something to look up to.

Audrey Tang: Huang is a social entrepreneur. He was 29 when he made the suggestion. He runs a social enterprise called “Skills for U” that invites those world champions into the rural primary schools and work with the students to rebuild their schools.

Audrey Tang: They redesign, co-design the schools into something that benefits the entire community, not just the children, like including their families, and so on. In this way, it shows the vocational training, the skills, as something that’s really useful and applicable to the community, not just something abstract, not just something that’s competitive.

Audrey Tang: The Minister of Labor, after listening to her reverse mentor, actually visited Russia with the delegation from the Taiwan world skills, where we won the fourth place internationally. They brought this back to the cabinet meeting, and lo and behold, it became a national policy, again, agreed by the head of the parliament and the head of the administration.

Audrey Tang: The idea of reverse mentorship across all 12 ministry that can become national regulations very regularly is the first idea of the Institutional Design Taiwan that I’d like to share with you. There is more social entrepreneurs in our youth council that are reverse mentor.

Audrey Tang: For example, the reverse mentor for the Ministry of Economy Affairs, Rich Chen (陳昱築), is also a social entrepreneur. He runs the Impact Hub Taipei, which is the global network. Throughout the influence of Impact Hub Taipei, not only does he helped running our own social enterprise summit for the Asia Pacific, co-branded with SEWF, but they also followed through event to register in the Social Innovation platform.

Audrey Tang: It’s that all the social enterprises, all the social innovation organizations around Taiwan, is now registered as of this year on the common platform, called                                                       SI Taiwan                                                  . Here, you can at once view the various different municipalities and counties.

Audrey Tang: Each one, with their voluntary local reviews, or the voluntary national review parts, would declare which SDGs they’re focusing on. All of the over 400 social enterprises would have to declare which SDGs they’re working on as well.

Audrey Tang: The reason why reach advocates, this kind of declaration, is that we can use AI systems, machine learning, to automatically bridge these goals -- missions, markets and measurements -- to the geographically nearby public listed companies.

Audrey Tang: Over half of Taiwan companies that are publicly listed are using GRI for sustainability for reporting. Just with one click, as a social entrepreneur, a young social entrepreneur, you can find the likely supply chain then for you to integrate with.

Audrey Tang: If any of those publicly listed companies or schools, whatever, bought your service or goods in total, maybe every year for more than 160 million USD, then I personally go out and give out an award to the procuring company or organization.

Audrey Tang: If it is a school, a university that does this procurement, maybe they don’t care about the Digital Minister. We’ll make sure that the Minister of Education goes out and gives out the award, and so on. Basically, what we’re rewarding, at very little additional expense, is a full integration of a young entrepreneurship into the supply chain.

Audrey Tang: I just received in my email this morning that Rich Chen is bringing out in our cabinet-level meeting the week after I fly back to Taipei next week, that he now wants all those 400 social innovations organizations to be supported by all related ministries, for example to have a symposium around the UNGA time in New York as a kind of public diplomacy initiative.

Audrey Tang: Very interestingly, already eight ministries wrote back, and seven of them said it’s a good idea. Basically, having reverse mentors really works to not only work across sectors, but also across the silos, across various ministries.

Audrey Tang: Now, the moderator, the chair, asked a really good question at the beginning of this panel. How can we start from having the representatives that are exceptional use young social entrepreneurs into the idea of actually really talking to their constituents, to their communities, to their local, rural indigenous nations and so on?

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we have this design where every Wednesday from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM, you can talk to me in the Social Innovation Lab in Taipei for 40 minutes at a time. The only thing I ask is that we publish the conversation as a radically transparent transcript on the Internet after 10 days of co-editing.

Audrey Tang: For people who cannot make it Taipei that easily, I actually go to people. Every youth counselor and every ministry in the Social Innovation Plan can summon me every other Tuesday or so across Taiwan in all the different municipalities and counties.

Audrey Tang: Because it’s Taiwan, we have broadband as human right, even if it’s the top of the Yu Shan Mountain, 4,000 meters, or the south-most Pacific islands of Dongsha and Taiping, you’re guaranteed to have 10 megabits per second at US $16 per month, otherwise it’s my fault.

Audrey Tang: Basically, we have the total coverage, like 98 percent of coverage, in the remote areas. No matter how remote the area we go, we make sure we meet with the local young people, young social entrepreneurs, co-ops, and so on, but meet them face-to-face with the people in the municipality in the Social Innovation Lab in Taipei.

Audrey Tang: All the 12 different ministries send people who are section chief level or higher to this place. We share food, share music, and then we use high-bandwidth teleconference to link those places together. In Taiwan, we say meeting face-to-face builds 30 percent of trust, 見面三分情.

Audrey Tang: Across high-bandwidth video conference, it maybe builds 70 percent of trust. Those town halls invites people to where they’re already living, but we bring with digital technology everybody related to it, so that we can respond in the here and now.

Audrey Tang: If any of those remote places like Yilan invited us in, requires some changes in the Ministry of Health and Welfare’s legal framework — for example, they require telemedicine and telediagnostics, emails, and so on — then the reverse mentor for the Ministry for Health and Welfare can go ahead and propose something for the legal changes. Every year, we run the Presidential Hackathon. I have no time to explore that, but please google that.

Audrey Tang: The idea is that every year, all the social entrepreneurs can submit an idea and co-pilot it for three months. Every year, our president give out a trophy for five winning teams. There is no money associated.

Audrey Tang: The trophy is a projector. If you turn on the projector, it projects our Dr. Tsai Ing-wen, our president, handing the trophy to the team. It’s very useful in the public sector. If your director-general say there is no budget, you summon the president, and you have the budget.

Audrey Tang: If your ministry says it requires cross-ministerial communication, it’s too much of a hassle, you summon the president, and there will be a meeting next week. That’s the presidential promise. Whatever the social entrepreneurs have prototyped in the past three months, we guarantee to fulfill it with all the regulations, budget, and personnel within the next 12 months.

Audrey Tang: This kind of top-down binding power, through a young person’s leadership, acting through reverse mentor and the town halls, is a real good institutional design to make sure that we can build reliable data, effective partnerships, and knowledge sharing in the sense of open innovation.

Audrey Tang: Thank you so much.

Neil McLean: Thank you, Audrey. It’s inspirational. Again, I think it’s just amazing what is happening in Taiwan and the follow-on from Edinburgh is just fantastic. Thank you for sharing that. Following on from that, from the policy forum conversation we had on Tuesday, how can policymakers work collaboratively younger social entrepreneurs at the policy level?

Audrey Tang: In Taiwan, we’re now training our civil service academy, the idea of design thinking. Previously, when we’re doing service delivery, we focus on the implementation and delivery, the develop and delivery.

Audrey Tang: The social entrepreneurs are excellent in discovering and defining emerging issues, because for the national government, we can only change our direction once per year. For the social entrepreneurs, the social situation, the emerging issues change once every couple weeks, and they discover those new, emerging solutions.

Audrey Tang: I think the proper role for the young social entrepreneurs in particular is just through these kind of meetings that brings the 12 ministries in the Social Innovation Plan to the rural, indigenous, or whichever places that actually have the social innovation done, and map to discover and define faces.

Audrey Tang: So that the entire country can see that this is really something that a “how might we” question, “how might we go together” question that is properly solved in Yilan, in Taitung, or in any of those remote places.

Audrey Tang: They are no longer remote, because they’re already connected to the six municipalities. The ministries will then take care of the development, define, and deliver part of that design process, so the ministries can rest assured that they’re already implementing something that is emergent, that is cool, that gives them credibility.

Audrey Tang: Also, having just the young entrepreneurs lead the way, and make sure that the society have a real conversation before the service is design and delivered.

Neil McLean: That sounds wonderful. Thank you for sharing that. Again, in Scotland, we’re very fortunate to have a conversation that existed before we presents social enterprise economy. We’re looking at co-production.

Neil McLean: I think that level of integration that you’ve achieved in Taiwan is just quite inspiring and clearly very strategic, so thank you.