How might we establish the social impact platform of the 21st century?
imece is a social innovation platform bringing together an interdisciplinary community for creating a sustainable and innovative impact on social and environmental challenges while enhancing collective capacity and providing incubation services for impact entrepreneurs.
Company: ATOLYE
Role: Design Research Lead
Scope: System Design, Learning Experiences, Community-as-a-Service, Multimedia
Year: 2017
Globally, concepts of social innovation or social entrepreneurship are increasingly becoming more and more paramount for tackling the ecological, economic and social challenges that face the globe. It is now clear that governments, the public sector, academia, or NGOs are not equipped to solve these challenges within their domains. They are in need of a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach. At the same time, expectations from for-profit corporations are rapidly shifting. Just recently, in January 2018, Larry Fink, CEO of Blackrock, world’s largest asset management fund declared that “To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.”
Turkey and the surrounding region have challenges such as access to relevant education, gender equality, accessibility, environmental sustainability, displaced populations and mobility, etc. These grand challenges offer opportunities for social entrepreneurs – people who are passionate about social, environmental and economic challenges and view entrepreneurship as a way to scale their impact potential.
However, what was missing was a holistic ecosystem approach bringing together a community around social impact, enabling collaborations across sectors and stakeholder groups, generating locally relevant content, building talent capacity and enables social impact entrepreneurs to flourish.
We collaborated with Zorlu Holding – one of Turkey’s leading conglomerates and S360 – one of Turkey’s leading strategic sustainability consultancy firm- to build imece, Turkey’s leading social innovation platform. imece was and still is a perfect fit for ATÖLYE’s values and multidisciplinary DNA. Since imece’s design and development kick-off back in March 2016 until today, the team and community members contributed to the successful inception of the platform. Scopes that were essential for this journey are so far: strategy, design research, branding, service design, UX, UI, coding, communications, community building, learning design, operations, spatial design, startup incubation, business development, product design, hardware design, manufacturing, rapid prototyping and team formation.
We asked ourselves the question: “How do we repurpose this the word in today’s context of social entrepreneurship, newly emerging problem-solving methods, and the need for multidisciplinary collaboration?.” As the answer for this question emerged imece, a social innovation platform that brings together a multidisciplinary community for creating sustainable, innovative and impact-focused projects and startups on social, environmental and economic challenges in sync with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. imece’s efforts are centred around the topics: Incubation, Community Building, and Capacity Building.
imece’s Social Entrepreneur Support Program is a 7-month Pre-incubation and Incubation Program that guides ten teams through a pre-incubation process in which teams learn and practice human-centred design and lean business canvas. Three winning teams receive 120.000 Turkish Liras of grant and ongoing incubation support consisting of over 300 hours of mentorship, workspace, training, access to the ecosystem and investor relations.