The average social entrepreneur is a white male between the ages of 30 and 45, with an education and a medium-high socio-economic statusso right now social enterprise is not a place for everyone, it’s not an accessible, diverse or inclusive place,” Ashoka Spain and Portugal Director Irene Milleiro said emphatically during the Impacta+ initiative presentation held this week. in Madrid.
We are immersed in a polycrisis in which the world is increasingly unequal and where the urgent climate emergency affects the poorest, innovation has long required companies capable of solving the world’s major problems and entrepreneurs whose business models include contributing something good to society. . And to achieve this, in addition to getting more financial support for the deep technologies we so desperately need, It is necessary to increase the diversity of the business ecosystem.
This is exactly what Impacta+ is pursuing, promoted by Ashoka and supported by Google.org. In addition, the Spanish business ecosystem consists of more than just application services, the project also tries to the business community ceases to be a miniature version of the elite that controls the world and that it causes so many problems.
Algorithms created by white men can end up discriminating against women and other groups. Machine translation systems designed by English-speaking developers exclude those who speak other languages. Any business that doesn’t consider accessibility is leaving out people with some type of disability. Not to mention that Lack of diversity in work teams hinders productivity.
Knowing all this, how is it possible that we still allow the business world to remain in the hands of the same usual suspect prototype? “We cannot face gender, socio-economic, territorial and generational differences alone“The challenge is so great that we cannot do it alone,” warned the director of the Office of the High Commissioner for Spain, an entrepreneurial nation, Carolina Rodríguez.
Do it, lines of action in which Impacta+ works are as follows:
- Develop more training, funding and support available for profiles with socio-economic needs.
- Encourage and facilitate more people to consider entrepreneurship to solve a social problem or challenge as a profitable life option.
- Extend the development of social entrepreneurship beyond specific settings such as universities.
- Support a change in the language and image used in the media regarding social entrepreneurship.
- Strengthen alliances between all sectors of society.
The world doesn’t need a multi-minute delivery app or a yacht charter platform. It needs things as complex as reducing greenhouse gas emissions, securing food and combating desertification, but it also needs to promote STEM careers among girls, support the economic and sustainable development of the grassroots, and Ensure the digital skills needed for the jobs of the future.
And for all this, we don’t need a super-powerful quantum computer or a cutting-edge autonomous robot, we need more entrepreneurs with a broad vision of the problems and needs of all groups and the appetite to solve them. For this purpose, Impacta+ studies the initial situation and proposes strategies to improve it. The initiative was born in June 2022 and is expected to last until July 2024 More than 70 people, organizations and institutions have already participated in it.
The activity takes place around 3 innovation labs composed of more than 20 experts working together to define challenges and solutions. Education, one of the most important, was represented by Begoña Gómez, director of the Department of Social Transformation at the Complutense University of Madrid, who warned: “In the master’s degree, It took us almost a month for companies to see the social impact as part of the companyit takes a long time for them to come out of the box.’
However, the efforts of initiatives like Impacta+ seem to be gradually achieving this. In fact, on the same day of their presentation, Fundación para la Diversidad and Fundación IE published their report Inodiversity in the Spanish business structure 1999-2020. The text concludes that, on a scale of 0 to 10, the innovation index score decreased from 2.55 in 2019; until 3.02 in 2021 until 4.11 in 2022, i.e. almost doubled in the last three years.
This progress means that Spanish companies increasingly have, among other things, higher rates of female leadership, more workers with disabilities and more senior talent. It may be a bad time to be a rich white man, but after centuries of subjugating his vision of the world, more representation of women, the elderly, and all types of groups among the working and entrepreneurial masses is just what the world needs to be a little better.