Audrey Tang: How can I help?

Jameel Somji: Thank you so much. My name is Jameel. I run an innovation lab out of Toronto, Canada. It is called SpiNovation Labs. I help companies prototype and test new ideas with real customers in four days. I’ve been doing it for the last three years. That’s my for-profit side.

Jameel Somji: I have not-for-profit side as well called Knowledge Philanthropy, where I help charities, small to medium-sized charities, that have anywhere from 1 to 50 people. I help them prototype and test ideas in three to four days. I have a partner. She works in the healthcare sector in Toronto. We’re targeting small to medium-sized charities because they don’t have money and they don’t have capacity in terms of certain human skill. I use a Google methodology. It’s called the Design Sprint...

Audrey Tang: Design Sprint.

Jameel Somji: Yes, the Design Sprint Methodology.

Audrey Tang: Looking for challenges.

Jameel Somji: ...yes, looking for challenges can contribute their time and knowledge in a structured and efficient way to effect change. What we found is that people don’t want to give money to help charities, they want to be part of the solution. This is a concept we are testing with a couple charities at the moment.

Jameel Somji: I’ll give you an example. In Canada, I’m working with a foundation that helps families that have given birth to babies prematurely, to educate them on how to cope going forward. In Canada, it’s about a $600-million problem for all infants affected over the first 10 years of life due to strain on the heath care, education and social services resources.

Jameel Somji: Preterm births are completely preventable. The Executive Director of the foundation doesn’t know the root cause of the problem nor that a solution for this problem exists.

Jameel Somji: The solution for this problem is very simple. I only know this because I have a friend who’s a public servant that works in research in this field. The two...

Audrey Tang: It’s a real innovation. It’s new.

Jameel Somji: It’s new. Yes, and based on a recent research study, which recommends that every woman that is having a baby have the size of their cervix measured. If it’s beyond a certain size, then they are at risk of having a pre-term birth and two simple treatments options can be used to mitigate that risk.

Jameel Somji: What we’re trying to do is bring people from civil society that have knowledge in research, tech, marketing, etc. together to share their time & knowledge with charities. We call it Knowledge Philanthropy. We are starting up this concept in Canada. It’s a form of social innovation, using the Google Sprint methodology.

Jameel Somji: I just wanted to share that with you. It’s something that we’re working on. The concept is in it’s early stages in Toronto, Canada. I just wanted to get a sense of what your thoughts are on the idea. Are you using the Google Sprint methodology to...?

Audrey Tang: I’m well aware of it. There’s many teams incubating here, employs this technology. The name, SpiNovation (your lab name), What does it signify to you?

Jameel Somji: It’s a different spin on innovating. Everyone talks about innovation, but really, innovation is a process. It’s a process of bringing different people, cross-functional teams together.

Jameel Somji: The key to innovation is to form a cross functional team to research the root cause of a problem and then ideate and vote on solutions that can be quickly prototyped in a day or so and then tested with users/stakeholders as soon as possible to get the feedback you need to iterate on the solution until you find the right fit.

Jameel Somji: I have worked in a corporate Fintech innovation lab setting, where we worked on prototypes for months before getting the opportunity to test it with customers because senior management didn’t think it was ready or pretty enough to start testing with. They were worried about damaging the reputation of the company by testing something that wasn’t complete nor of high fidelity.

Jameel Somji: The reality is if you have something new, you must test it as soon as possible. It’s going to be iterative. SpiNovation is just a different spin on how you innovate.

Audrey Tang: I see. I visited MaRS.

Jameel Somji: I worked at MaRS.

Audrey Tang: I gave a talk there [laughs] and had a tour of the place. What I was quite impressed was that there’s a Civic Tech Toronto. They share the idea that anyone can volunteer to be usability testers or just people who want to try out the latest innovation in public service. They curate so that they’re more diversified.

Audrey Tang: When you contract out to, say, universities for user experience testing, they tend to start with their students and graduate students and so on, which is a tiny slice of the whole population. You find something that they really like, but maybe to the detriment of everybody else, right? [laughs]

Jameel Somji: Absolutely, yeah.

Audrey Tang: They were just curating, when I visited, this cross-sectoral usability testing group so that when there’s any public service innovation, they can find the right cross-section of people. It’s not just diversity. It’s true inclusion. When you get people from five very different backgrounds around the same table, some really new ideas really emerge much quickly.

Jameel Somji: Very good. I also teach at Ryerson University before I came to Asia. I actually moved to Ho Chi Minh because my wife got a job in Ho Chi Minh as an expat. We just got married in December last year after being together for 5 years.

Audrey Tang: Congrats.

Jameel Somji: It’s really great. She’s actually originally from China. She came to Canada at the age of 17 for school. Then I met her at work. Three cubicles down. An office romance.

Jameel Somji: I came to support her. Also, I found a partner in Canada to help with my business there, but now I’m looking to also expand into Asia. I didn’t know about you. I was actually on the bus yesterday. I saw you (the big Social Innovation Lab sign) so I googled it.

Jameel Somji: I came across your amazing Medium article entitled: ’Social Innovation in Taiwan’. That’s how I found you. I said, "I’ve never met someone that works in the government that has open office hours." and here I am today, getting to talk to you. It’s quite amazing. For me...

Audrey Tang: Where did you see me in the sign? [laughs]

Jameel Somji: I didn’t. I just Googled Social Innovation Lab Taiwan. I came across your article. I read through your article. You mentioned open office hours.

Audrey Tang: Open office hours.

Jameel Somji: It was like anyone that’s open to talk about social innovation. I work in a very similar stream, so I thought I would come by and drop in and see if it’s actually even possible. In my mind, in my heart, I didn’t think it would actually happen, but my God, it just actually did.

Audrey Tang: It’s true serendipity. [laughs] That’s fate.

Jameel Somji: It’s amazing. Right now, I’m working with two charities in Canada, as a test. We’re trying this out for the first time. One of the biggest challenges we’re finding is that charities are so busy doing things that they have no time to schedule in 3 day sprint engagements.

Jameel Somji: They’re currently working towards certain initiatives. Yet they’re using old methodologies that can months or even years to cycle through without much certainty of success.

Jameel Somji: This charity idea I mentioned stemmed from a past client and now partner of mine. She came to me with this charity fundraising idea to raise money by targeting millennials.

Jameel Somji: We prototyped something in four days using the sprint methodology, and what we learned that millennial’s don’t want to give money. They have the money, but they don’t trust charities. They want to give their time.

Jameel Somji: They don’t want to spend too much time on a project. The maximum amount of time they’d like to spend is about two months on a project, but they want something that’s structured and meaningful. The good thing with the sprint methodology is that it provides structure.

Audrey Tang: Do you often get people who come back to you?

Jameel Somji: Absolutely.

Audrey Tang: Roughly, the interval, like one month, four days a month?

Jameel Somji: I find that medium-sized companies move faster than large-sized companies, but it is still a bit slow. Also, when I work with startups, they activate quickly and they can iterate quickly. The iteration sprint is something that I count as clients wanting to come back and continue with the process again. This usually happens a week or two after the first sprint.

Jameel Somji: I also specialize in teaching people how to use the sprint methodology. My goal is not for companies to be handicapped and depend on me. It’s to teach and enable them to conduct the method themselves. If a company has a product designer, a product manager or project manager that can shadow me throughout the sprint process, I give they are able to conduct sprints on their own after the sprint with my sprint guide and toolkit.

Jameel Somji: Training teams is part of my engagement. I’m a teacher by nature. My dad was a teacher. The greatest gift you can give someone is education. If you can teach someone ’how to fish’, then they’re better off, rather than them having to depend on you for ’food’.

Audrey Tang: What brings you here to Taiwan?

Jameel Somji: I’m here visiting a friend, actually. He is my university friend. I just moved to Ho Chi Minh last week. I’m trying to see how I can expand my services in the region.

Audrey Tang: Certainly.

Audrey Tang: Taiwan is 90 percent MSME. We are small and medium sized.

Jameel Somji: It is, right?

Audrey Tang: Right. This whole design thinking, sprinting, pivoting, and things like that, it is part of our DNA anyway. My first hire as digital minister is an interaction designer, and from there, service designer and so on. We just recruited another designer from IDEO.

Audrey Tang: This kind of methodology, we’re very familiar with it. Just like what you said, we’re not looking to let citizens to be dependent on government offering co-design workshops or services.

Audrey Tang: We’re all about making our methodology open and making sure that all the NGOs or non-profits can run this kind of exercise and find the fit that they have with the larger ecosystem. Maybe they become self-sustainable.

Audrey Tang: There are many large social enterprise in Taiwan that start as NGOs and evolve into co-ops or into social enterprises. That is actually my main focus at the moment. It’s just to make sure all the entrepreneurs somehow become social entrepreneurs, and to make all the large companies think sustainability, not as CSR, but as business development. That’s my main work.

Jameel Somji: That sounds fascinating. One of the things that we’re trying to think about now is we get funding for our charity organization. There’s a lot of CSR initiatives happening with corporations, but we’re trying to see whether they’d be interested in putting their dollars towards projects that have been tested vs. vague untested projects/ideas based on conjecture.

Audrey Tang: That’s right. It’s real impact-evaluated.

Jameel Somji: Absolutely. For the example with the pre-term birth issue that we’re working on, we have a charity partner that is focused on helping families that are managing pre-term birth instances. Their goal is to fundraise so they can scale this program to other hospitals.

Jameel Somji: However, fundraising is not sustainable. I think they should focus their efforts on how to stop the problem. If you have a way to stop the problem that’s backed by research, and an implementation plan that’s been tested and validated, then there are companies that will likely back you.

Audrey Tang: Very much so, or even crowdfunding.

Jameel Somji: Or even crowdfunding will back you. Citizens have disposable income to spend. They currently however don’t trust charities because they don’t know where their donations go and whether the money is being used prudently. If ideas get validated through the sprint process, it helps reduce the risk of failure and brings more transparency to the situation, resulting in positive outcomes that are achieved faster and more effectively.

Jameel Somji: Doing this en masse can make the world better. Civil society solving problems on their own without dependancy on government. Civil society has to take over. By doing that, we might be able to actually reduce taxes and increase GDP over the long term.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, of course. We’re actually learning from Canada, because in Canada, there’s a social financing and social innovation initiative. David LePage and friends did a pretty good report, I would say, that explains exactly what you mentioned about. They call it inclusive innovation. I don’t know whether you’ve heard of this word.

Jameel Somji: I’ve heard the term.

Audrey Tang: There’s a strategy that’s being put together that, as you said, tries to, instead of CSR or capitalism with some solutions, try to make it into truly impactful capital, and then making sure that everybody gains from it, instead of just on the short-term, but on the long-term basis.

Audrey Tang: This is a good report. It’s all online anyway, if you google for inclusive innovation. We are setting up a steering group, what we call our National Advisory Board, with the civil society, with the support but not control from the central government, to come out with a social finance strategy for Taiwan. That’s something that’s really worth pursuing.

Audrey Tang: I have two questions. Are you full-time based in Asia now?

Jameel Somji: Full-time based in Asia.

Audrey Tang: Oh, wow. Congrats.

Jameel Somji: I’ll be here for the next two and a half years, because that’s how long the contract is for my wife, but we don’t know. The growth in the world is happening in Asia. There might be an opportunity for us to stay a bit longer, but for the time being, we are based out of Asia.

Jameel Somji: I work out of Dreamplex in Ho Chi Minh City. It’s a coworking space there. Like I said, I’m just...

Audrey Tang: What’s it like?

Jameel Somji: It’s nice. I’m getting to know people.

Audrey Tang: Dreamplex.

Jameel Somji: Yeah. Obama spoke there in 2016.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, I’ve heard of it.

Jameel Somji: That was nice. It’s busy. Early-stage startups for the most part, some more mature. A lot of freelancers work out of there as well.

Audrey Tang: Not too bad. Not too bad. Do you miss Canada? [laughs]

Jameel Somji: I miss my family, but they’ve been very supportive. My mum is a bit older, so it’s a bit difficult, but she understands that this is a good career move for my wife, but also for me, it’s very important to understand what’s happening here (in Asia).

Jameel Somji: We can learn from the East. We’ve been in our North American bubble for a very long time. I’m looking forward to learning from the East, sharing whatever knowledge I have from the West with the East, and hopefully seeing some reciprocation.

Audrey Tang: As for building connections, that’s my next question, is that I don’t know whether you’ll have time in May. In May 11 and 12 in Kaohsiung Exhibition Center is our annual Asia-Pacific Social Enterprise Summit.

Audrey Tang: This time, it’s quite different from last year in that, first, it’s much larger. Also, we make sure that we invite not just Asia-Pacific partners, but also a few people from the international scene as well. That means like the cofounder of Malala Foundation, Shiza Shahid and I think someone from Canada as well, the director of the Social Innovation Lab. Her partner is someone I know of in the Mozilla Foundation, Tonya Surman or someone.

Audrey Tang: What I’m saying is that it’s in tune with what you just talked about. It’s not just the Asia-Pacific solving its own problems, but rather a genuine exchange with the international scene and making sure that the methodology that’s developed outside Asia-Pacific is adopted in a way that is useful here, and also what we can contribute to.

Audrey Tang: Tonya Surman, she’s the founder of the Canadian Social Innovation Centre or something. We will have a social entrepreneur that is much more...

Jameel Somji: I know the executive director at CSI

Audrey Tang: Yeah, the CSI.

Audrey Tang: That’s great. We’ll have Tonya here. We also invite all the CSI equivalent in this Asia-Pacific to collaboratively be the judge for the Asia-Pacific Social Innovation Partnership Award. In terms of networking, I think that’s the spot to be in.

Audrey Tang: We just started opening for registration literally this week. If you can be in Taiwan then maybe make a visit to Kaohsiung. The website is apses.asia.

Jameel Somji: I’ll take a picture if you don’t mind.

Audrey Tang: Yeah, just take a picture.

Jameel Somji: Absolutely, I’d love to. This is really my passion. It’s quite amazing. I’m also working on a project, it’s a pro bono project. Half my time is spent on pro bono work, and half my time is spent on for-profit. My for-profit funds my not-for-profit.

Jameel Somji: I’m working on a project in India right now with the Aga Khan Development Network. We’re working in the area of trying to target the working poor, primarily youth and housewives. We’re looking to find ways to lift them out of poverty.

Jameel Somji: Right now, we’re in the middle of the sprint. We have a solution. I’ll show it to you if you want to see it. Let’s see if we can find it. We haven’t tested it yet.

Audrey Tang: You also use InVision?

Jameel Somji: Yeah, I use InVision. It’s something I put together last week in a day for the test. This is connecting lower-income youth with training opportunities. Some are very traditional type jobs, but also online jobs.

Jameel Somji: Youth have more potential to learn digital jobs very fast. We’re thinking of finding business owners from around the world that need support but can also provide the training. It’s like a brotherhood. Businesses with a heart can quickly train youth and in return get the support they need at affordable prices.

Jameel Somji: Rapid prototyping (is a training opportunity), for instance. This is my company. I just put it in as an example. The job description will be to design prototypes of new products and services, that sort of thing. Here are the skills required. Here are the skills youth will learn. Here’s what youth will get paid. Here’s the frequency of jobs. Here is the training cost (free in this case)

Audrey Tang: If they’re using this app, it’s self-evident. [laughs]

Jameel Somji: Yeah. We have to test it, just as an example.

Audrey Tang: Of course.

Jameel Somji: We’re starting off with youth, then we’re going to focus on housewives. Housewives are also time-poor, because they have to look after the household, however they have been in school for longer than their husbands and are more responsible with money. Finding income pathways for housewives is also in scope. What we found is that increasing incomes by just US$100 per month can lift a working poor family out of poverty.

Audrey Tang: It’s interesting. Here, you say three days, on your name card, four, and on your Facebook page, five. It’s very flexible.

Jameel Somji: Yes, it’s flexible. You know the book by Jake Knapp? It outlines a five day process conducted by Google Ventures. Google Ventures has a portfolio of investment companies, and they own that relationship, so they can demand five days from these companies.

Audrey Tang: It’s not that easy, especially with charities you just mentioned.

Jameel Somji: Exactly. There’s also a four-day sprint methodology that’s mainly targeted towards medium and large-sized corporates (who have no time). In a 4 day sprint a corporate team only has to be there for the first two days. The corporate team doesn’t need to be there on day 3 (prototyping day) and on day 4 (testing day), however it’s highly encouraged.

Jameel Somji: The three-day methodology is actually used throughout Google internally (not Google Ventures which is a separate entity). I’ve been lucky enough to attend the Google Design Sprint Conference last year in San Francisco. There, the person who is in charge of the Google Sprint Academy, her name is Kai Haley. Her team published a three-day sprint because everyone is so busy. Day 1 focuses on understanding the problem and ideating solutions. Day Two is voting on one solution to prototype and completing the storyboard for the prototype in the morning and starting to build the prototype in the afternoon. The morning of Day Three is reserved for finishing the prototype and the afternoon is reserved for testing it with five people. When we test with five individuals, we get about 85 percent of the customer sentiment. You’ll learn a lot and have a clear direction on what to do next

Jameel Somji: I love this framework. After three, four, or five days, you can find out if your idea is a flawed success, efficient failure, or an epic win. Typically, 80 percent of first ideas fail. It’s hard to tell people that at the beginning, but then they go through the process and they understand how nuanced problems are.

Jameel Somji: I had a team that was working on a technology that heats the roads through kinetic energy. The cars driving on the road creates kinetic energy which can then heat the road so you don’t have to shovel the snow or salt the roads to rid of the ice. The team had been working on the idea for eight months. They tested with different municipalities within Ontario. The idea was an efficient failure. It was four really driven students who had been working on their idea for 8 months, and after a 5 day sprint, their souls were crushed.

Jameel Somji: I said it’s good to know this now rather than spending another eight months on the idea.

Audrey Tang: Yeah. It’s always better to attach to the impact rather than the tech, right?

Jameel Somji: Yeah, exactly. It’s been quite a pleasure talking to you. Thanks so much for sharing your time. I now you’re very busy.

Audrey Tang: No, it’s fine. Everybody gets to have 40 minutes.

Jameel Somji: It’s really nice.

Audrey Tang: These folks, Anchor Taiwan, they’re a interesting tourism agency that basically just brings entrepreneurs that are successful outside of Asia, but give them a whirlwind tour of all the right connections in Taiwan.

Audrey Tang: It just connects that maybe you will find the community interesting. If not just applying yourself, maybe you can be one of their supporters or mentors and things like that.

Audrey Tang: They’re quite successful in terms of just having the discovery period, making sure that your ideas is translated culturally to something that makes sense locally. That’s their main work. The founder just visited me again as a office hour [laughs] a few days ago.

Audrey Tang: Because everything is on the record, so people can just Google and randomly discover a write-up or a previous case or things like that. You might want to take a picture and then...

Jameel Somji: Yeah, I’d love to.

Audrey Tang: ...see if the Anchor Taiwan community can be of help to you.

Jameel Somji: Absolutely. I love it. Thank you so much. What are some of the biggest challenges that you’re facing in your role?

Audrey Tang: As the digital minister?

Jameel Somji: Yeah, exactly.

Audrey Tang: At the moment, we’re working on the protection the election, the democracy apparatus. Everybody saw that there’s a loophole against our campaign donation laws, which is pretty standard. Only nationals get to donate. There’s accountability, full structured data opened to the public to audit and things like that. Pretty standard, pretty good.

Audrey Tang: There was a loophole that says anyone can buy social media or media advertisement -- it could be foreign money -- to [laughs] support a candidate. Instead of going through our pretty reasonable campaign donation rules, we see, in the previous election, lots of foreign capital just betting, basically, through precision-targeting several messages.

Audrey Tang: It is something that all the democracies face right now. We’re building a coalition. I’m actually going to Ottawa, in end of May, in the Open Government Partnership, to share some contributions that we have to this.

Audrey Tang: Of course, legally, we put an end to that in the next election. Such sponsorships or targeted advertisement will be subject to exactly the same strict standard as campaign donation.

Jameel Somji: How do you police that when it’s hard to...

Audrey Tang: It’s just like AML. It’s just like anti-money-laundering. Anyone who works on advertisement and even the platform providers, like Facebook...

Jameel Somji: They have to be responsible.

Audrey Tang: ...they have to do a full disclosure, independent audit. The people who sponsor need to disclose their sponsors as well so ultimately, we can make sure that everybody is playing fair.

Audrey Tang: That kind of thing is a challenge. People do see that there is disproportionate polarization going on in the democratic narrative, but we also have ways to fix that too. I think we’re on the right road.

Jameel Somji: You are tackling a very, very real problem that, obviously, we’ve seen over the last three, four years how much impact...

Audrey Tang: That’s right.

Jameel Somji: ...that’s had in especially North America. That’s a real problem. I’m so glad that someone is doing that. That’s quite amazing.

Audrey Tang: We’re like a lab for democracy anyway. [laughs]

Jameel Somji: That’s really amazing. Wow. I’m so inspired just by talking to you and hearing that you’re working on real tough problems such as this. It’s really great.

Audrey Tang: Cool.

Jameel Somji: Thank you so much for your time today.

Audrey Tang: Thank you. Feel free to write anytime.

Jameel Somji: Thank you. I appreciate it.

Audrey Tang: Cheers.

Jameel Somji: Cheers. Thank you.

Audrey Tang: Thank you.