The Solutions Lab: A Different Kind of CSR Conference

To some extent, all CSR conferences are the same.  An organization or company wants to promote itself, and in this spirit puts together the best line-up of speakers it can secure to represent its brand to the outside world.  The caliber of speakers and the makeup of keynotes and panels attracts participants from the parts of the field that the sponsoring organization wants to target.  Intertek's Ethical Sourcing Forum, the NY BBB CSR Forum, and the Ceres conference were three such examples of this phenomenon.

But leave it to Environmental Defense Fund to create a very different kind of CSR forum.  In a quest to create an "incubator for big ideas", EDF's Innovation Exchange has worked with the San Francisco-based Dig In (as well as Ashoka, Net Impact, and a bunch of other sponsors) to create a series of ten "Solutions Labs".  Last Friday, I attended the New York City version (hosted by Bloomberg) and for anybody interested, there are still eight more scheduled to take place between now and September (information provided below).

Here's how the Solutions Lab worked.  Prior to the event, attendees were asked to fill out an online questionnaire including questions about what they hoped to get out of the conference.  Based on this wishlist, the organizers developed a number of roundtable "theme" tables.    Guests were then left to gravitate to any tables of interest (there were two sessions, so participants could select their two favorite themes).  Then, in the afternoon, participants were asked to select the topics they'd like to explore further and join a group of like-minded folks to solve a problem, find a solution, and present the result to the entire conference (these discussions were called Design Charrettes).

After attending panels on "Sustainability and the Profit Motive" and "Community Development", I was ready for something new, so I decided to join the problem-solving session for small and medium enterprises.  My group was a funny one--- a cleantech lawyer, an intern at a small CSR consultancy, two recent graduates of sustainability programs, three men from a pesticide-turned-construction-management-company, and a fellow from a quasi-governmental agency specializing in helping NYC start-ups identify and connect with sources of capital.  As often happens, two of the more vocal personalities dominated the discussion, and before we knew it, the rest of the group was listening to the CEO of the construction management business riff about his company's problems  (CSR-related and otherwise) and the fellow from the quasi-governmental agency respond with a  number of possible sources of capital (grants, loans, etc)  that he could consider.

Based on the presentations at the end of the problem-solving discussion, my experience at the NYC Solutions Lab clearly wasn't typical.  While my group ended up tackling a case study in sustaining an SME during difficult economic times, the types of problems on the table were for the most one large-scale ones such as "how to fund local sustainable innovation" and "how to activate effective community collaboration to implement energy efficiency retrofits".  By the end, groups had tackled some of the big problems in sustainability and had developed detailed and well-considered proposals for how to solve them.

Will EDF and Dig In elicit actual outcomes from these conferences?   By their own admission, this was an experiment, and while the organizers made a plea for participants to use the Wiki to keep them stay abreast of any connections or projects that come out of the conference, it is still a bit unclear how this will work.  Nevertheless, optimism in itself never hurt anyone and, with a format conducive to deep networking, there is a higher likelihood of meaningful connections (trackable or not) coming out of the forum than one normally finds at CSR conferences.

Future Solutions Labs are scheduled to take place in Washington, DC (May 27), Minneapolis (June 17), Fayetteville, AR (July 13), San Jose (July 15), Chicago (August 5), Seattle (August 10), Boston (September 16), and Austin (September 29).