Impact Hubs make up a global network of people, places, and programs that inspire, connect and catalyze sustainable impact.
Belgian Curator Marco Torregrossa had a chat with Simon to understand how collaborative consumption can bring about social innovation and achieve real impact.
Tell me something about yourself and help me to figure out the link between a social innovation laboratory and a collaborative consumption marketplace. Where do they intersect and where do they differ?
Impact Hub is a bottom up and locally driven network. As global managing director, my focus is on technology, growth and business development. In many ways we are a prototype of a collaborative consumption marketplace. Concepts such as complementary currencies and sharing of resources have been tried and tested within our spaces and many organisations want to connect with us on collaborative consumption topics. We are based all over the world and we are placed within different cultural settings. When some of these innovations take roots, we can easily become a platform for them to scale.
I don’t think there is much of a difference between a social innovation laboratory and a collaborative consumption marketplace. I believe it is important to talk about facts and figures, if resources have been invested efficiently and what the return of that investment is. At Impact Hub we do not focus on storytelling and anecdotes but we like to verify everything with data. The impact investment field is becoming huge and metrics are needed to understand how success should be measured.
Simon, you are based in Amsterdam. I understand you are opening up new Impact Hubs all over the world. I used to be a frequent visitor at the Hub in Brussels until it shut down. What did not work and what lessons can all of us draw from this?
In the history of our network, only 5 Impact Hubs have closed over 9 years, while 53 opened up to date. It’s a fairly low rate of “failures” if put in perspective. As a result of what happened in Brussels, we learnt some key lessons that are essential to any kind of business similar to ours. For an Impact Hub to succeed one would need:
- The right team
- A relevant business model
- The right location and the right space
3 to 5 full time dedicated people are needed to run an Impact Hub and take the different programs forward. The team has to achieve a significant amount of impact and pay attention to the right business model to achieve that impact. In Brussels there was an assumption to copy the model from other Impact Hubs, for instance London. But Brussels has a lower costs real estate market compared to London. So the co-working component of the offer was not competitive. In addition, considering the nature of Brussels, it would have made sense to run more EU programs. Also, the way the space was designed was not efficient. It was a large open room that was good for events, but not for co-working. Anyway, we have already been approached by some local organisations and I am quite confident we will have a new Impact Hub in Brussels within one year or two, it just needs a bit longer to resurface.
We are experiencing a shift in power balance from centralised organisations to distributed networks of people. Freelancers are powering the sharing economy and in Europe they have begun to organise around co-working spaces. What makes the Impact Hub different from other co-working spaces? How could this help to scale both the sharing economy and the freelance economy?
One of our main program focus is on entrepreneurs and freelancers are often included in this category. We welcome them in our spaces if they fit the right profile and have an impact focus aligned with the work we do.
Many Impact Hubs contain co-working as a key component. We are all excited about the collaborative movement and co-working movement as a means to get people out of their cubicles and out of their bedrooms and kitchens into a place where they can interact with other human beings. However this is only one third of what we do. The other big component is curating community relationships. We call it the “art of hosting”.
“We seek to work very closely with our entrepreneurs to maximise their potential for growth. We build online and offline communities and strong relationships with the people we host”.
The other component is educational content, which is not only inspiring lectures but for instance we have “impact schools” in Sao Paolo, Brazil with 4000 students that use Impact Hub as a learning platform. In Madrid we are running an accredited bachelor program on social entrepreneurship in partnership with a university. We also run a lot of incubation and accelerators programs for institutional organisations and corporates. We support them to learn from our entrepreneurial focus so they can leverage that in their more established environments.
Just because we are not depending on co-working spaces alone, we can be incredibly flexible to synergize with other partners, whether they do co-working, fablabs, accelerator programs, impact investment programs etc. We are happy to work out what is the systemic support we can offer to help all of them achieve their impact. We normally begin by placing ourselves in a city and we try to cover the gaps in the market there. We want to integrate our programs with those ones already running and we provide the ecosystem around so they can flourish.
We’re seeing areas where governments, large business and communities come together and embrace sharing. A few organisations are doing a great job to connect the dots, stitching all actors together. What are great examples of partnerships you could mention and in what traction sectors? What policies at European level would be most efficient in accelerating the transition to collaborative consumption?
We are participating in the EU funded project BENISI, which tries to understand how social innovation can scale and how we can structurally do that as a network. The project is a good experiment of partnering with a range of organisations across Europe that are enablers in the social innovation sector. We are very excited about the non-profit, private and public sector getting into this space and we are open to collaborate with anyone who is serious about this.
“Specifically, I think we are an attractive partner for a city administration to work with. From a Mayor’s office point of view, we are a sort of free public service to enable social innovation, create jobs and stimulate entrepreneurship”.
As to policies, we are more in favour of legislation that achieves practical results rather than simply debating regulations. While the EU Commission has been discussing for the last 10 years social innovation, we opened 15 Impact Hubs in Europe. Some of the policies we are mostly interested include access to capital for entrepreneurs, crowdfunding for equity and social innovation. From what you told me, I understand the EU Commission recently launched some stakeholder consultations around these issues and I look forward to see these policies implemented soon.
What do you think is the next frontier of collaborative consumption? Some say it will be cooperatives, others say reputation or trust systems. What is the best format and business model for a successful collaborative consumption marketplace?
The biggest mistake we can do is to say there is a standard model. For instance forcing the cooperative model into everything does more damage than good. One needs to figure out what collaborative model can solve a specific problem, the best framework that reaches the highest impact and then build an execution plan around it. I would recommend a business model that applies to the local context, incredibly simple and flexible, focussed around core values and principles. And then it is important to give the people you trust and that are aligned to your core values freedom to operate within that model. I cannot sit in Amsterdam and tell someone in Bogota’ what the best approach should be, as I do not know the local context and how that translates in reality. We can provide shared metrics and programming and transfer knowledge from one location to the other, but then leave the specific interpretation up to the locals. 90% of our economy is domestic, close to home. People like to talk “global” but always prefer “local”.
As to the new frontier of collaborative consumption, I think connected platforms are the future. Types of ranking based on trust and reputation combined with how to leverage social capital will mean a lot, from purchasing to getting a job etc. The ways to acquire data and inform these kinds of systems is already there and we just need to connect the dots. Collaborative consumption is incredibly present as well as the social innovation that glues it together. When this is applied at neighbourhood level, opportunities are endless. For instance I have seen this in practice in the sector of skills sharing here in The Netherlands.
