Six challenges, 14 tables, and 120 leading professionals willing to debate major challenges to turn them into opportunities. This is the formula adopted by the Ship2B Impact Forum in this edition, precisely to maximize its impact and translate into concrete proposals and solutions to challenges facing society.
The challenges, like society, are diverse: they range from affordable housing to violence in childhood, including unwanted loneliness, the utilization of natural capital, sustainable food, and water as a resource. To address them, an experiment: a new methodology to involve professionals from various fields in the search for solutions and proposals.
"To generate different results, we have to do things differently," highlighted Antonio González from Impact Hub, which, along with Ashoka, has supported the development of a new methodology by Ship2B and Change4Legacy. "This is a prototype, and it gives us the opportunity to play and experiment," he emphasized alongside the general director of Ship2B Foundation, Guillermo Ricarte. This is because "complex challenges require complex solutions," and a perspective from diverse angles, in order to promote profound "systemic changes."
To face the challenges from this new perspective, a first rule: participants have left their mobile phones and business cards in boxes, to "stop being who we always are," as innovation consultant Carmen Castrejón from Casa Matriz indicated. And other rules and guidelines: each table, with about ten professionals, focuses on a challenge, through a six-stage process, which begins by looking at the problem and ends by co-creating solutions and landing them with actions and funding. Among the tables, panels and whiteboards with diagrams and annotations fill the space, which just minutes before was configured as an event hall, and which has rapidly mutated to host this experiment. "Play the game, with the most open mind possible," Ricarte invited the participants, who have been discovering the new steps as the day progressed.
All with one goal: to accelerate systemic change processes, "those profound transformations that involve transforming the way of looking and narratives," highlighted from Ashoka Irene Milleiro. "It is to stop seeing aging as a burden and see it as an opportunity, or to stop seeing the rural environment as something of the past, and see it as an actor of the future," illustrated the director in Spain of Ashoka, an organization that has been promoting social innovation for 40 years.
The tables become a hotbed of interventions, where each participant contributes their point of view to analyze the challenges and seek new ways to approach them as a joint opportunity. And it is that "individual solutions are not enough, and we must move towards collective impact," according to the co-founder of Change4Legacy, Beatriz Ibáñez. Like a collective mind, the participants have been dissecting the challenges and elaborating proposals jointly, with which reports will then be built to focus the responses to each of the challenges faced during the day. Before this experiment, the day also featured interventions by entrepreneurs, representatives of administrations and leading figures, such as the Deputy Director of Equity Investments at the European Investment Fund (EIF), Uli Grabenwarter, who went in the same direction: "Our ambition must always be to eliminate a problem."
The Impact Forum was held after a gala where the Impact Awards were presented, in which the co-founder and president of Ship2B, Xavier Pont, emphasized the need to move from individual impact to collective impact. With this objective, the foundation has contributed to accelerating more than a thousand projects in its 12 years of activity, during which it has invested in 56 of them. At the gala, initiatives such as the social innovation cluster SIC4Change and the startup Pensium were recognized, as well as the CEO of Global Social Impact Investments, María Ángeles León, and the project Brave lives, rebuilt lives by the Asociación Entre Mujeres y Soulem.
The awards were presented during a day in which the venture capital firm Ship2B Ventures announced the launch of its second fund. The BSocial Impact Fund II has been promoted as the largest social impact venture capital fund in Spain, with a first closing of 65 million and with the aim of reaching a total of 80 million. Always with one objective: to invest in startups that address social or environmental challenges, such as improving the quality of life of vulnerable groups or the decarbonization of industrial sectors, perhaps some of the projects that take shape as a result of this first collective experiment of systemic transformation.