Anita appreciated Roger’s excitement about this agenda at two levels.   First, he was enthusiastic about the overall agenda of supporting leaders in private companies in developing strategies for public engagement.   And second, Roger was sparked by Anita’s suggestion that social entrepreneurs could prove concepts that could be profitably scaled by corporations.  There’s a connection here to the open-innovation paradigm, which Roger describes as “connect and develop.”   He says, as a company, you may not be great at inventing “cool concepts for making the world a better place, so open your doors and let some of these ideas for the social-entrepreneurship sector in…”   

On the first point, Roger emphasized the importance of the firm’s profitability and business model.  He described how engagement in the public interest works over the long run – in other words, that it is sustainable – when a company can figure out a way to make money by doing that.   This idea is very much aligned with Anita’s thinking about how companies should not be expected to do things that are not in their interests over the long run.   She’s been writing about how alternative forms of organization to the widely held, privately-owned company – such as non-governmental organizations and closely-held companies – may be better suited to pursue some goals in the public interest than is the widely held, publicly traded corporate form of organization that we usually think of as the iconic firm.    Roger’s point is that companies that are organized in this iconic way have a tough time sustaining commitment to initiatives that are not in their interests. What does this mean for Pi²?   It means that leaders in private companies who want to pursue public aims have to figure out a way to do that profitably if they want to engage the corporation in the effort. Roger emphasizes the importance of taking the pressure off the private corporation for doing unprofitable things, and the pressure off the government for doing subsidies.   

On the second point, Roger got excited about the idea that the social-entrepreneurship sector could generate proof-of-concept ideas that could subsequently be scaled profitability in the private sector.  Indeed, he wanted to return to that possibility after Anita tried to move forward in her questions.   The idea that the social-entrepreneurship sector could serve as the innovation engine for experimental ideas and they pass them along for profitable scaling up seemed to Roger to be a fruitful area for much more research. The idea that partners from different sectors could take advantage of the form of their organizations as social entrepreneurs vs. private companies leads to the possibility of working together to leverage this difference to create a sum greater than the parts.

Throughout the conversation, Roger reiterated the importance of building understanding and deepening connections across organizations.  He suggests that private-sector leaders who want to engage on public problems must know as much about those they want to serve as they know about their customers.   There is nothing more powerful than relationships, analysis, and sophisticated engagement for strengthening effectiveness across siloed organizations – both public and private.  Roger described how social entrepreneurship can play an accelerating role in accomplishing this.