After this year’s Feast On Good conference, I am left feeling the perfect balance of satiated and inquisitive. The overarching theme of the event – Reinventing Industries – was the perfect platform to showcase a myriad of some of the most exciting social innovator/ions going on today. Here’s my list of highlights:
- Re-examining long-standing systems: Some of society’s most deeply rooted systems (government, education) are in need of a major overall. Amendments and initiatives are just band-aids for sectors that need massive surgery. But how to do you redraft something that is both steeped in tradition and also have everyday implications? Having hypotheses is one thing, but experimenting in areas like education – with real students leading real lives – has a significantly high risk factor. Speakers Patri Friedman (Seasteading Institute) and Tony Wagner (Change Leadership Group) proposed two ideas as solutions: Floating cities — to build new political systems from scratch — and school labs — actual R&D facilities for education — respectively.
- Finding the right fit: Agility and compactness rein supreme. The shift from big to small, national to local: A trend towards keeping things smaller and more community-based was echoed throughout the day. Small start-ups = big potential.
- Identifying new models of consumption: Collaborative Consumption – a growing movement discussed by crowd favorite Rachel Botsman — is an exploding market concept. In large part Collaborative Consumption echoes the above sentiment about *going local* but takes it a step further — or backwards, depending on how you see it. People are returning to systems of bartering, sharing, lending, exchanging, etc., which translates to huge potential a number of innovative companies, but perhaps more interestingly, highlights a provocative observation about consumer behavior: In Western culture we have a deep seeded fear about sharing; and this plays out into the way industries are branding themselves. There is a reason that hotels don’t call themselves “bed-sharing” businesses. Perhaps something about the thought of sharing things smells too much of communism? So it’s about perception. Misperception really. It seems that in order to fully enable this movement of Collaborative Consumption, we have to re-brand that it means to share things; taking it away from a place of intrusion and towards a place of mutual, societal benefit.
- Baking social progress in: Social innovation is permeating every industry imaginable. This is a bit of a no-brainer, I know. But it’s refreshing to see how everyone from architects to engineers to foodies are starting ventures with social progress integrated into their business models from square one. Creating Shared Value can be financial and social, and the pioneering, social entrepreneurs that fully understand this are bound for long-term success.
While inspired and charged by talk of a future in the making, one key thought stayed with me for most of the weekend: Accessibility. It is hard to sit in a room where the *general* demographic is under 30, highly educated, liberal-minded do-gooders, and feel that society at large is being represented. Everyone at The Feast deserved to be there – no doubt – but by the same token, I believe, we each have the responsibility of sharing what was discussed.
It’s easy to exist in a bubble where everyone around you is equally socially conscious and concerned with innovating business models that address much more than financial bottom lines. It’s harder to think about how to make this same sentiment applicable to the mainstream. So I pose this challenge: How do we synthesize all the goodness that was shared at The Feast and pay it forward to the critical, public mass in a way that is digestible?
Image credit: bhamsandwich