Deane-Williams House

Transcription

Daniel Almagor, RMIT social entrepreneur in Residence. Welcome to the SEEDS annual lecture. I'm very excited to be inviting you here and to welcome you here. Dr Hartigan is the director of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the Said Business School at Oxford University, which I'm figuring is an incredibly long thing to write every time you want to write something [chuckles] but it's pretty impressive, and having been to the Skoll conference it really is the premier conference on this stuff in the world. It's just ... it just blows your mind. If any of you want to come with me next year, I'll be going, maybe we can take a whole little contingent from RMIT. Pamela is also the founding partner of Volans Ventures. She's an adjunct professor at Columbia School of Business. She was previously managing director of the Schwab Foundation. Schwab Foundation is the claim to fame of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, and they set up a foundation around social entrepreneurship so Pamela's clearly been in this space for a very long time and prior to that held various roles at the World Health Organisation. So I think when we hear about Pamela's bio, and I just read the brief version, it just continues on and on at this incredible ... incredible list of distinguished things she's done. So without further ado I'd like to invite Pamela to come up and talk to us about how we can be somewhat unreasonable in our lives as well. Thank you. [Applause] Dr Pamela Hartigan, Author of the Power of Unreasonable People I'm delighted to be here despite the fact that it's freezing here in Melbourne [laughing] and I've come from the European summer and ... which is always hard to leave because it's so brief, it's not like all of you here in Australia how you're so lucky with the weather. But I really want to thank RMIT and very specifically Danny for this opportunity to exchange some perspectives and advance understanding of how social entrepreneurship is evolving around the world and the implications of course for Australia. I'll begin by sharing my observation that the practice of this kind of entrepreneurship has until now been rather slow to evolve in countries where people expect the government to take care of everything and where citizens pay a considerable portion of their earnings in taxes to make sure the government does its job. But recently, even in such countries, governments and citizens alike are coming to grips with the fact that the growing number and complexity and inter-relatedness of the economic, the environmental and the social challenges that we face need dramatically different approaches and that's where social entrepreneurship comes in. But what exactly is social entrepreneurship? Before we describe what that means, I'd like to first consider the practice of entrepreneurship for that is very well understood in Australia. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor co-ordinates the world's largest study of entrepreneurship and business ownership. Among its findings several years ago it revealed that Australians are the most entrepreneurial inclined peopled in the developed world with 20% planning or running their own business. In 2011 the entrepreneurship, at a glance report, put out by the OECD countries, shows that Australia is an entrepreneurship paradise in comparison to many other OECD countries, ranking the number ... the country number two in its list of countries with least restrictions to start a business, and I might tell you that New Zealand ranked number one, and ranking number seven in the list of countries with the least administrative burdens for start-ups in the world. So if commercial entrepreneurship is understood what is social entrepreneurship? Put simply social entrepreneurship and commercial entrepreneurship are two sides of the same coin. Both types of entrepreneurship combine innovation, resourcefulness and both leverage opportunities to create new systems and new practices. So what's the difference between a social and a commercial entrepreneur? Basically it boils down to where each places its priority. A commercial entrepreneur from the very outset of the venture primarily focuses on generating some sort of profit. Why? Because the assumption is that they have to pay back their investors and begin to generate returns. In contrast the social entrepreneur from the very beginning is actually setting out to address gaps that neither the government nor the market has been able to fill. And while ventures that social entrepreneurs create might be profitable the bottom line is not to make a profit but to change the system. One thing is clear, social entrepreneurship is not another term for charity, for the charitable sector that applies palliative, bandaid and unsustainable approaches to social problems. I don't mean, by the way, to imply that charities are not important to our societies; they are needed very much to carry out the redistributive function in society for those citizens who do not have the ability or have not had the opportunity to develop their talents. But charities don't change the system. They do not address the root causes of the problem. In contrast, social entrepreneurship is the practice of finding sustainable, innovative pathways to completely change the system. Social entrepreneurs are practical, they're innovative and they're solutions oriented. They want to change the situation for whatever condition is spurring that inequality. Social entrepreneurs don't want to build the school, they don't want to build the hospital, they want to change the education system, they want to change the health system. Now, governments have had a very difficult time understanding the role of social entrepreneurs in society. But it's really not so difficult. Let me draw on an example from the field of health. It seems appropriate given the number of years that I spent working in the international public health system focusing first in Latin America, which is my region of origin, and then later globally at WHO. At WHO we were frequently, as World Health Organisation, I hate when people speak in acronyms and don't explain what they are. At WHO we were frequently caught in the tension between using a medical approach and a public health approach. Put simply the medical approach is individualistic and it's focused on responding to an illness, usually through surgery or some sort of a drug that's supposed to cure the problem but a public health approach seeks to prevent that health problem in the first place. It's a population based approach and it seeks to alter the system that's causing the problem and we often use the following example to sort of illustrate that point. Say there's a very high mountain in a particular country that's a huge tourist attraction, the roads to get to the top of that mountain were built at the turn of the 20th century and they're now narrow and treacherous, consequently there are many fatal accidents on that road. Now the medical approach is to construct the hospital at the bottom of the mountain so the unlucky travellers can be treated more quickly but the public health approach is to widen and upgrade the mountain road, build speed bumps and steel railings along the side, in other words to change the road that leads to the top of the mountain and prevent accidents from ever happening. Similarly the charitable approach is to respond to the immediate needs of individuals suffering a problem. So we have soup kitchens, we have welfare payments for people who are out of work and shelters to support the homeless, the poor, the abused women and children in our society or remedial education for those who have difficulty learning and so forth and these services are highly important but they're not really changing anything about the causes of homelessness, unemployment, violence against women and children, learning disabilities and so on. Charitable organisations seek constant donations to support efforts to assuage the suffering of those who are afflicted with these social illnesses and governments understand their role very well. But what about entrepreneurs and their organisation? To clarify their role it's really important to consider the function of entrepreneurs in the economic system. The German economist, Joseph Schumpeter, focused on the entrepreneur as an innovator and an agent of change in the society. He suggested that entrepreneurs drive the creative destruction process of capitalism. According to Schumpeter the impetus for the capitalist system comes from individuals of courage who risk their fortunes to implement new ideas, who dare to innovate, to experiment and to expand. He believes, quote, the function of entrepreneurs is to reform or revolutionise the pattern of production, unquote. They can do this in a variety of different ways by exploiting an invention or more generally an untried technological possibility for producing a new commodity or producing an old one in new ways, by opening up a new source of supply of materials and new outlets for products or by reorganising an industry and so on. Think of Thomas Edison and the light bulb. Think of Eli Whitney and the Cotton Gin, which revolutionised cotton production and brought in the age of industrialisation. Think of Henry Ford and his innovative assembly line approach that allows cars to be mass-produced. Think of Florence Nightingale who transformed the public health system and more recently think of Bill Gates at Microsoft, Mitchell Baker at Firefox, the woman who successfully took on Microsoft's monopolies of Windows or Steve Jobs at Apple, etc, etc, etc. All these entrepreneurs and many more have or are completely transforming our lives and the way we do things. Similarly social entrepreneurs are the creative destruction force in the social system. They work where businesses have failed to come up with innovative ways to design and deliver the goods and services needed to address social, economic and environmental challenges. Why? Because the risks are too high in comparison to the financial profits that they can make, similarly these are issues that governments have been unable or unwilling to tackle because of financial, political or bureaucratic constraints. Now social entrepreneurs are drawn to deal with such challenges, transforming the systems and the practices that have stood in the way of pragmatic equitable and sustainable solutions. They are the mad scientists in the social innovation lab that come up with new approaches to address the many social and environmental issues that concern us. Think of Muhammad Yunus who transformed forever the idea that the poor, especially women, were not credit worthy and now we have microfinance institutions and mainstream microfinance programs and mainstream banks or Jimmy Wales and his Wikipedia, a free open content encyclopaedia which today is available in the world's 10 leading languages. All around the world there are men and women who have used their talents and creativity to challenge the established acceptable way that society operates. To illustrate what I mean by a systems approach to solving problems I've purposely chosen three examples from those who have spearheaded social ventures in countries that are better off economically, some that have government dominated social models somehow similar to Australia's. The point is social entrepreneurship is an approach or a practice that is carried out in countries around the world. I'll start with Olivier Desurmont. He's French, born in Lille and he's now 33 years old. He worked in Paris at the headquarters of the huge French water conglomerate Suez as head of their IT division but then there was a massive heatwave in 2003 that struck France. That summer in an underground parking lot in Paris he found some young men washing cars with a liquid solution that didn't need water but the washing solution that they were using was highly polluting, highly toxic, and left scratches on the cars. So instead of a problem, however, Olivier saw a huge opportunity, as do all opportun ... entrepreneurs, they always see opportunities where we we see problems. Now he did some basic research and he discovered that in France there are 30 million litre ... cars ... 30 million cars and 35 million cubic metre ... litres of water a year are used in commercial car washes to clean them. He was looking at a 750 million euro a year industry. Seized with a passion to address water waste through a market opportunity he quit his job at Suez, moved back home to his parents' house in Lille, much to their disappointment I have to say. His mother told me he went from being a Suez staff member to being a car washer. His mother was very disappointed, he relentlessly pursued a biochemical laboratory to convince them to work with him, initially pro-bono, and come up with 100% biodegradable car washing product that needed little water. He hounded these people despite countless initial rejections that kept, you know, no, is the most common word entrepreneurs hear. The lab finally agreed that they would try and help him, probably because they wanted to get rid of him 'cause he was so annoying. But the experiment actually succeeded and Olivier patented the product under the label Younus. He then brought himself a second-hand ute, as you call them here in Australia, utility vehicle and went door to door seeking clients. He hated the job but he was very excited about the response that he was getting. The part that he told me he hated the most was that he actually had to drink the biodegradable solution in front of his future clients to prove that it actually was harmless. He said he ended up going to the bathroom three times as much as he ever did during the day but at least the trick worked and his client base began to grow. So he founded his for-profit company, SINEO, in 2004. His first employees were those who no-one else would hire. The uneducated, the unskilled, immigrants and other socially marginalised. Nine years later SINEO has 300 full-time employees across 30 sites and it's growing. Seventy percent of his workers continue to be the unskilled that few will hire. SENEO has saved 48 million litres of water since its inception and today its biodegradable products are available in Belgium, Germany, the UK, Switzerland and Greece. He developed a social franchise system and through that he's rapidly expanding projecting double the sites by the end of this year. It's franchised its model to these different countries but it did refuse a US company because it was only interested in the car washing solution and not in employing the people ... the kinds of people that Olivier was employing. Another example, which I love, is UK based Kresse Wesling who says she thinks about garbage and waste 24-hours a day, seven days a week. A business woman with three successful ventures to her credit she saw the opportunity for a new company four years ago while she was sitting in the back of a room with, as she puts it, some really cute looking firemen. They were all taking a boring class on ISO 1400 standardisation that would enable them to implement an environmentally ... an environmental management system in their companies and the firemen were there because they were challenged with what to do about fire hose that had to be retired from use but is not biodegradable so it ends up in landfill and Kresse was there because she wanted to know more about how to perform an environmental audit in her business. And that's when she came up with the idea for Elvis and Kresse or E&K, the for-profit company she and her partner Elvis started as a result. E&K makes eco-friendly lifestyle accessories from reclaimed waste. The fire hose range of luxury bags and belts is crafted from London fire brigade hoses which end up in landfill if they can't be mended. E&K scrubs away the soot, the grease and dirt and creates belts with buckles made from recycled pewter, stylish bags and wallets and because of the fabric's limited supply fire hose accessories are aimed at the luxury market. She got some wonderful PR when Cameron Diaz wore one of her belts on the cover of Vogue and it was totally unsolicited PR and, you know, they've been growing like mad. Now E&K gives 50% of its profits to the fire brigade, which builds a strong community ser ... spirit, secures E&K's supply chain and it creates a story that appeals to the customers. They're also exposing the outrageous margins in the luxury industry because giving away half the profits isn't an issue for them, despite the fact that E&K's prices aren't as high as many brands. And I'll give you one final example, which I also love and is very moving and it's quite different and it's the story of Danish entrepreneur Thorkil Sonne. Thorkil worked as a landscape architect in Copenhangen when his son was diagnosed with autism at the age of five. The psychologist described what lay in their son's future, ostracism, joblessness and a life of dependency. Thorkil thought of the dandelion and how for some it's a weed but for others it's a medicinal plant. So how could he reframe the way society views autistic individuals so that people see their strengths and to do so he founded Specialisterne, a Danish for-profit company that employs only autistic workers to test software. Their capacity to focus and their attention to detail and precision are exactly the kinds of skills needed in such a job. His company became very successful, leading the competition in Denmark for software testing ... for the software testing industry. As people working with autism around the world found out what Thorkil was doing they clamoured for him to come and help them replicate that model and to do so he created the Specialisterne Foundation. He sold his profitable social venture to the foundation for $1 and the foundation now own the company. So after he pays the workers he actually is using the money to spread the model around the world. Now as you can see Thorkil, Kresse and Olivier are very unusual people but the types of these peop ... these people that we are calling social entrepreneurs exist in every society, even Australia. The problem is that the majority of us when we come into contact with these kinds of people think they're either weird or slightly insane. They pursue their vision with such persistence, such dedication and such energy that they are frankly exhausting to be around. I'd hate to be married to one of these people. And because their primary purpose is not to earn money but to use their profits to grow their social mission we think they're even weirder. Ask any successful social entrepreneur what their biggest initial challenges have been and I can assure you that it was overcoming the fears and negative thinking of their parents, their spouses, their significant others, friends, colleagues who thought they were completely crazy to do what they were doing, begging them to follow a more traditional path or normal as the word is. It's much easier to simply accept the status quo than to try to change a system or a practice. Now one of the major challenges that all change makers face, even when they are successful, is that because they disrupt the established way of doing things they are not welcome. And this is even more difficult in a country like Australia where tall poppies are quickly cut to size and face it, all entrepreneurs are tall poppies. They are change makers. If you think about it most managers and civil servants deal with what is. Change makers do exactly the opposite. They focus on creating things the world has never seen yet their world does not give them sufficient status or opportunity to transform their societies for the better. Originality and creativity are viewed with some suspicion. Most organisations seeking to employ people look for evidence of academic achievement and a boring steadiness that produces good exam pass rates and grades, rather looking for ... than looking for experiences that might suggest that the candidate is innovative or inspired or perhaps even slightly rebellious. This is because most organisations have a very low tolerance for mistakes. Risk adverse societies and organisations definitely keep people from failing but they also keep them from trying. Attitudes towards setbacks and failures are major factors in nurturing or curtailing the spirit of innovation and invention because, face it, every step of the way these entrepreneurs and others have taken like them is riddled with failure. In developing the light bulb Thomas Edison said I have not failed, I found 10,000 ways it doesn't work and that's really the pattern for most entrepreneurs and here I want to call attention to one aspect of social entrepreneurship that I often think scares some people or puts people off and it's this notion of the superhero. While we very much love heroes of course the tendency to glorify individual social entrepreneurs is a huge mistake. True, they are extraordinary people in many senses of the word, however I can assure you that they would not be the successful ones able to have achieved what they have done without a strong and committed team of people that have been infected with their vision and bring their own talents to implementing that vision and that's very important. The other thing I want to highlight is that there are people that work within systems, be they government or companies, that we would call intrapraneurs, who are functioning in that same change-making catalytic role and their role is as hard as the entrepreneurs who are outside, So we need to really look at what does it take to be an innovative individual within a system or outside the system. Some of us are better off within a system; some of us have to do it from the outside. The really amazing thing is that despite the fact that support ... the supporting ecosystem of policies and institutions is lacking in almost every country in the world to help these innovative organ ... these innovative organisations scale for greater impact they manage to do what they're doing and that's what's heroic. If we look at the economic system, there's a host of policies in organisations that have been created to facilitate the flow of money and support of services to mainstream businesses that operate in the capital markets. There are raiding agencies, angel investors, venture capitalists, investment banks, consulting firms, auditing firms, recruitment agencies and government incentives through tax policies, trade preferences, etc. There are even dedicated schools to teaching future business leaders such as the MBA program that I'm involved in. This supportive ecosystem is what has allowed our economies to flourish. Now very little of that exists for social entrepreneurs and their organisations. The emergence of organisations that defy traditional classification because they're neither profit maximising businesses nor philanthropic charities has presented a huge challenge to authorities in many countries. As is evident from the examples that I provided, you know, this pursuit of a social mission through both for-profit and not-for-profit structures and traditional legal structures provid ... been a huge constraint, they ... governments just don't get how do you actually facilitate these kinds of organisations. So many social enterprises are generally created under multiple different legal structures, as for example was evident with Specialisterne. He had to ... he created a for-profit company, then a foundation to actually allow him to do what he does and that also brings with it additional administrative burden and confusion over tax exemption status, unrelated business income tax issues and ownership control. But social entrepreneurial ventures refuse to dichotomise how they make their money and how they improve society. They thrive where markets and governments haven't stepped up to the plate. They work precisely at the market fringe neglected by mainstream companies because the perceived risks are too high in comparison to potential financial returns and in responding to these opportunities I believe that they are the harbingers of the new business models that would hopefully be a way of combining markets and meaning. Something we've lost sight of over the last few decades and which recently has come come home to roost. Australia's often been called the lucky country but those of us who know Australia might debate that descriptor. Last Friday's Financial Times in London carried a lead article that was entitled, Australia's Mining Boom Masks Crisis in Economy. In that article Peter Smith writes that, quote, the natural resources exports drive record trade surpluses but much of the country is mired in gloom. I'm not quite sure whether that's true or not but this is what he says. And he quotes Michael Burn, who is chief of Australian transport group, Linfox, as saying if we didn't have mining Australia would be like Portugal, Spain, maybe Greece and Ireland. To many people in other parts of the world, including where I live now in France, they just think Australia is the land of every ... every possible good thing that could ever happen, this article seems really at odds with that popular idea that Australia's economy is riding high on the back of boom conditions in its mining and energy sectors thanks to Asia fuel demand for its plentiful natural resources. But the spoils of the resource boom are not felt uniformly, as all of us here know. The nation's retail, tourism, education and manufacturing industries are grappling with the strong Aussie dollar and weak consumer spending. In fact, Russell Zimmerman, who's executive director of the Australian Retailers Association, which is a trade body, said the industry was very close to recession like conditions. So not everybody in Australia is in the fast lane. There are many households out there in businesses for which the going is very tough. I've been coming to Australia, as Danny mentioned, several times a year for the last 40 years, since I married an Australian from Perth. I'm still married to the Australian from Perth. My daughter followed in my footsteps and now ... meaning she married an Australian, and my grandchildren are now Australian, so I have a huge affection for this country but I've always noticed that in general Australians tend to be a self-satisfied group of people. She'll be right, the attitude today I think is rather dangerous. Australia has its share of social and environmental problems that are ripe for innovative entrepreneurial approaches. Like many industrialised countries it has an ageing population and refugees who seek better lives in this country encounter many hurdles in the process of adaptation. Drug addiction is a problem among youth and alcoholism is persistent. Depression and other forms of mental illness affect too many people here as elsewhere. Environmentally Australia has .32% of the world's population yet produces 1.43% of carbon dioxide emissions. This means that per person pollution levels are 4.5 times the global average, just below the value for the US. It is exporting its natural resources as if these will never run out, so she'll be right will not go on forever. It is time to encourage innovative committed individuals to focus their talents on coming up with new approaches to social and environmental challenges. By neglecting the innate interest of all of us to contribute in a positive way to our communities many countries unwittingly deny themselves a great deal of their potential for sustainable development and that is why actually it's so exciting to be here today with all of you, who I know are committed, creative, determined men and women who all want to seek to apply your entrepreneurial skills to finding those solutions to the many challenges that affect this country but also many other countries. And less I leave you with a spirit of gloom I want to tell you I'm incredibly optimistic. I think the global financial crisis is a wonderful thing. It actually is providing us with a huge opportunity to completely reframe how we should actually work together to save this planet and its people. You know, while our global economy might be in shambles and nations worry about how they cope with the fall out of greed, irresponsible financial practices and minimal fiscal oversight and people fear for their families and their future we actually have the opportunity to completely rebuild our economy from its ashes and shape one that combines markets and values. The role of government, business, academia, citizen sector, the media, in this process cannot be minimised, As we construct that new economic system we are responsible for making sure that we do not rebuild the house on the same weak foundations but seek to draw inspiration from all those very unreasonable people of which I'm sure there are many in this room who are leading the way. Thanks very much. [Applause] I think we have quest ... time for questions and answers. My name's Michael. I'm a student at the University of Melbourne and I'm a member of the University of Melbourne's SIFE team, Students in Free Enterprise, which is a global student organisation that provides free of charge services to social enterprises and community groups. I just want to say that was a brilliant speech and I've written down most of what you said 'cause it's really inspired me ... I'll send you the copy [laughing]. Thank you very much [chuckles]. My question was, I went to a book launch last month. You went ... I'm sorry? A book launch last month and it was ... the book was called, The Great Crises of Capitalism, written by a guy, Craig Johnson, he was a former chief economist of Australia's central bank and he said in his opinion capitalism is the world's best economic system but it has two really big weaknesses, inequality and unemployment. So I asked him what he thought of social enterprise and he said because social enterprise addresses both inequality and unemployment he believes that in my lifetime social enterprise has a potential to actually replace capitalism as the world's primary economic system. So I guess I just wanted to know what your opinion is on that very exciting concept? You know, I happen to be a lover of markets. I think markets have huge potential to actually transform the world. So I don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater because when you look at the examples that I gave you all of those are for-profit companies. There's a really interesting book that I highly recommend you get a hold of. It's by Roger Martin, who is the dean of the Rotman School of Business at University of Toronto, and I'm going to start charging him for all the times I've been pushing his book, but it just came out and it's called, Fixing the Game, what capitalism can learn from the NFL, the NFL is the National Football League in the United States and basically what he talks about is the fact that markets and, you know, and the function of business was fairly integrated with the values in society, perhaps up to the mid-'50s, 1950s, at least he's talking about the US and Canada, he's Canadian. And he says and what happened then was there appeared a very important and well-intentioned article in one of the leading journals, economic journals, which basically talked about the importance of incentivising CEOs in companies by paying them with stock options and also was the first place that it appeared that it said the business ... the major role of business or publicly traded companies is to maximise shareholder profit and that this had a completely ... it unintentionally reframed the way publicly traded companies have been run ever since and he gives the example, he says what happens is if you look at the NFL, the National Football League, says there are actually two games. Now I don't know how this applies to Aussie Rules but anyway, don't ask me. There's the game that is played on Sunday night and Monday night, which is the real game, and then there's the betting game that goes from Tuesday until Saturday and those are firewalled and if footballers actually play in the betting game they are banned for life from ever again playing football in the NFL but what has ... and so this keeps the game, both games, clean. What's happened with markets and publicly traded companies is that because CEO compensation is also tied to stock options the whole games ... the games have been brought together so that CEOs are no longer playing the real game of what products they're selling, they're looking at stocks and that's the game that they're playing and so when you see the stock market go up it has nothing to do with how the business is actually doing, it has everything to do with expectations and where the CEOs ... whenever you look at CEO lifetimes they'll drive the stock market ... the stock options up as much as possible so that they ... and then they get out, take their options with them and then the stock will fall. And so he says ... I mean this is a very simplistic way of actually illustrating what goes on in this wonderful book which I ... it's not very long and it's really quite readable, and I think that one of the problems has really been, if I look at entrepreneurs who set up their companies as for-profits and who are driven by a social mission, none of them go public and when they go public, as Anita Roddick did with Body Shop, just before she died she said the worst thing she'd ever done was go public and I think that a lot of that is because of this way we've reframed what it means to be a publicly listed company. So you'll find that many of these companies that are ... you know, Kresse's companies, Thorkil, etc, they simply don't ... they don't join the tyranny of the market game. So I strongly believe in capitalism or in markets, I think we need to reframe what needs to happen in the publicly traded market and hopefully, you know, I'm a great optimist. That was a great answer. Yes? Hi, it's Dugor Novak. My question is that capitalism by its nature depends on three markets. What I'm hearing is some sort of mixture of free markets and some sort of central intervention to give it a direction. Is it right? I guess what we're doing at this point is putting down the tracks as the train is coming. We don't really understand where we're going given, you know ... so I don't ... I don't really know what the future pre ... what the future holds in terms of capital markets but I do know that we need to reframe the incentives in those markets so that people are looking at what their companies are doing to society and to the environment as well but we do encourage, you know, free ... market opportunity. Free market I don't exactly know whether, you know, what kind of freedom are we talking about? Freedom that's ... in a way no regulation has brought us to where we are today, so, you know, I think we need to reframe the terms of engagement of business and money. Hi. Pamela, my name's David Hood. I'm a student at the School for Social Entrepreneurs and also work out of Hub Melbourne and very interested in how we can develop the ecosystem that supports social enterprise? Obviously opportunities for collaboration are one but I'm interested in your opinion on what things can we do or what initiatives that we can support to develop this ecosystem in Australia? Right. I guess the first place I would start is in the education system. I think that ... I think that young people really need to understand that Australia is a very rule-driven society and I think that it ... sometimes it's good to rethink whether those rules makes sense and that starts from a very young age. The ability to be innovative and to really think through what could be a different alternative or what could be possible to encourage young people to think differently is a very important beginning but if we look right now and we look at, you know, what to do now I think that one of the things we can really struggle or really try to do is to begin to look at what are the boxes that we put people into and how do we begin to break out of those boxes and begin to not see the boxes as much as we have tended to do. Creating the ecosystem I think we're on the cusp here in Australia of seeing a wonderful, wonderful regeneration of thinking around social entrepreneurship. The one thing I would say is that one of my fears about Australia is that since there are more politicians than kangaroos in this country [laughter] I worry that the role of government will immediately ... people will turn to government and go well, you ... you know, give us money to do this. I think the role of government is very important in creating the kinds of policy incentives for these types of organisations and in helping organisations to scale once they have achieved the model but I'd be very worried about having governments come in and decide who, you know, from the start-up phase. I think private capital, I think foundations, are much more important in terms of taking the risk, getting these interesting ideas investment ready and that governments should step in to help good ideas really scale but not in the early stage 'cause governments tend to ... you know, they don't want to rock the boat. So just a word, you know, I ... that's the one ... I've seen this happen in Britain and so that's why I worry and Australia tends to be even more government focused than Britain. [Clair Mongue], I'm an environmental consultant from Geneva, Switzerland. You've studied a lot of cases and you presented them to us and I was wondering if there's any pattern you see in successful cases. I mean my idea is do you have any advice here for the social entrepreneurs potential that are in this room? How can ... could they turn their, like, sparkle ideas into a successful business? Is there any also problems that they should be aware of? I think that the most important thing is to realise that your beginning idea will probably never be where you end up and that you will constantly be tweaking it in accordance with the feedback that you're getting from the people that you're trying to work with. There's a mixture, and it's almost contradictory, you need to be very focused on what you want to do but you need to also take in the feedback and so it's a delicate balance between hearing what people are telling you and ignoring what people are telling you because most people will tell you you're crazy and that it can't be done and if ... you know, so how much of it ... how do you really identify an opportunity? How do you really identify what's going to work and how do you know if your idea really sucks, you know, that's ... that's very ... that's tough. You just have to keep at it until you know that it's not working but get the feedback. So as I said it's a very tough question to answer and what you find is that the entrepreneurs that I've given you examples of and the ones that are in the book, Unreasonable People, these are the, quote, unquote, successful ones and as I said last night it's like going to a butterfly museum where you see all the dead butterflies that are all beautiful and they're pinned up against ... you know, they're Monarch butterflies, etc, but you didn't see the ugly phase of the cocoon stage, you don't see those. So every entrepreneur has a cocoon phase. We don't ... we don't celebrate that, I wish we would talk more about what went wrong because I think it's very intimidating to see the examples of people who really do everything ... you think they do it perfectly when it's been very tough for them, you know. I mean, Thorkil's son was five when he was diagnosed with autism. It took Thorkil at least eight, nine years to actually figure out what he was going to do. It takes a long time. Be patient and impatient at the same time. [Laughter] Any more ... that was great. Thank you. [Applause]