- My name is Aunnie Patton Power and I work
for the Bertha Centre for Social
Innovation at the University of Cape Town.
- I'm Stephan Chambers from the Marshall
Institute for Philanthropy Insertion
Entrepreneurship at the London School of
Economics.  - So, Stephan, you have run founded centers at two really elite schools. Can you
talk a little bit about what you think -
what's the role of universities in this
space of innovation? What can
they contribute?  - So as the world's
problems get more complicated , hey get
less tractable. And as they get less
tractable they need more and more to
understand things that are inherently
complicated and over determined. So the
solutions to problems in the world that
presents problems of homelessness or
poverty or inequality actually sit on a
set of phenomena that are enormously
complex. And mobilizing the resources of
major universities, who think deeply
about the hardest problems in the world,
is critical if we're to do two things.
One is come up with a set of solutions for
those problems. And two is educate young
people who are going to go on to
implement and invent solutions to those
problems.  -But if only 1% of the very elite of
the elite are going to these
institutions, how do we make sure that
the ideas they're coming up with aren't just
the ones from privileged - economically
privileged and socially privileged
backgrounds?  - Because the elite of the
elite go on to start and run things, and
therefore to touch the lives of all the
people they work with and all the people
whom they serve in those organizations.
Organizations in the public sector that
serve explicitly, but also organizations
in the private sector that often serve
inadvertently or often cause inadvertent
harm. So having people sensitized to
positive and negative externalities is
critical that touches almost everyone on
the planet.  - But don't you think we should
be making quite
an effort to make sure that we pull
people in. That we have the diversity of
opinion, so it's no longer this
beneficiary idea, but more of a
user-centric idea. So I think that's
something that universities can be a
powerful player and is pulling people in
different ideas together. This idea of
social capital. Universities are a
place where people build social capital
more quickly than almost anywhere else.
- Yeah.  - And so I think, I think there's a
role for universities and pulling
together different strange bedfellows
that potentially wouldn't meet outside
of a university setting.  -Yeah of course, of
course. Of course diversity is important.
Of course we shouldn't come up with a
bunch of solutions, which we then impose
on people who - for whom those solutions
should be good. That's clearly a busted
model, but ideas of - co-creation ideas - of
beneficiary centered solutions, these
derive from thinking inside institutions
of research and higher education. And
they're absolutely critical if we're to
make any kind of progress. So we
shouldn't think of these places as
Citadel's in which people cook up
solutions in abstract and then impose
them through public finance initiatives
on the presumed beneficiary. That's
obviously foolish.  - Well I think, I think
what we've talked about a lot is around
how millennials are demanding change. So
mean what I see from our students that
come through is we say we want to create
and we want to do this these types of
innovative financing, but really
they're demanding it too. It's not that
we're creating the curriculum and then
giving it to them. In a lot of ways
they're demanding that we don't teach
the old, the nineteen eighty five case
studies, these are you no longer
relevant in a lot of ways. They're 
wanting to learn what are the things
that potentially aren't in the textbooks.
And I think that's where our centers can
really be very influential in business
schools that potentially, you know, have a
lot of faculty that have been there for
a long time. And so I think in some ways
I see the centers that we work in as
voices for some of these new movements.
And sitting within an institution is
powerful because we're not coming from
the outside and telling
them to change. We're actually coming from the inside
and telling them to change.  - Yeah I agree.
In fact I put it more strongly than that.
I would say it is precisely millennials.
It's precisely students who care as much
about meaning as money who are dragging
institutions like mine, usually kicking
and sometimes screaming to take this
stuff seriously. And that's great, that's
called co-creation.  - Yeah I agree, and I
think that one of the things working in
South Africa is people are very
understanding - or understand to a great
degree - that the old ways don't work.  -Yeah.  - And so, you know, the young people that we
have coming through - these new young
leaders in Africa - realizing came of age
during the time when we really started to  be
very critical of development. And so
they see business as an opportunity to
be a social uplifter. And I think they
want new ways and they want structured
ways of thinking about that. And I think
that's where having centers that are
thinking deeply about how do you do
innovation. What does innovation look like?
Is the only way we're going to continue
to bring the type of learning and the
type of depth of thinking to the space.
And I think that - I think it's going to
be interesting to see how they grow and
the number of centers continue to grow,
not that scale is always the answer.
- Finding evidence for interventions is a
very hard problem. And universities are
places where smart people think very
hard about very hard problems including
problems of evidence. You know, what is it?
How do you find it? Does it validate
this hypothesis or some other hypothesis?
What might the counterfactual look like?
These are incredibly important questions
for people who claim to speak for other
people. So universities are not the whole
solution, but they are absolutely
necessary to develop the right way of
thinking about these order of
innovations.  - And you brought up a very good
point, which is institutions trust
universities. So when you're looking
at doing evidence-based policy, working
with any university that has access to
governments is a place that they go and
look for advice.  - And so, again,
it's not coming from the outside, it's
actually coming from the structures that
already exist.  - Yeah. We should make evidence
great again.  - Sounds good to me.
