Through a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) signed in Bangkok, SVI-School for Management and Social Change and AIT will establish a joint venture for the launch of an Executive Master’s pilot program on Third Sector Management and Fundraising, a program which is already offered in Europe.

The agreement opens the door for an Asia-focused advanced training platform for managers of third sector organizations, particularly in relation to social change. The joint venture will give AIT access to best practices in Europe and on Executive Master’s programs in Fundraising, Europrojects, International Cooperation, and Social Business.

For Dr. Marco Crescenzi, ASVI President, who was welcomed at the signing ceremony by AIT President Prof. Said Irandoust, AIT is suitable partner for its first overture in to the Asian higher education marketplace.

“We are with the right institute here at AIT,” he told the AIT president and officials attending the signing ceremony. “Our dream is to change society, and to build a new education platform for social sector managers.”

This being the first partnership for ASVI in Asia, Dr. Crescenzi said AIT’s globally recognized expertise and experience in knowledge management of sustainable development in the region provides a good entry platform for the joint venture.

AIT President Said Irandoust expressed his excitement over the private sector-academic and Asia-Europe linkages inherent in the partnership. Since the program will stress private sector validation of its graduates, the program dovetails with AIT’s emphasis of higher education for the today’s professions, he said.

A United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) report recently outlined an ongoing shift in international development cooperation away from finance towards other factors that contribute to positive sustainable development.

According to Dr. Sandro Calvani, Director of ASEAN Regional Center on Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the globalization of news coupled with less structured societies has produced a large number of well-informed citizens around the world, especially among young adults, who are continuously increasing their awareness on global issues, such as human rights, MDGs, climate change, fair international trade, social business, corporate social responsibility, and inequity in access to education and to credit.

This development makes global citizen action a real catalyst for modern change and innovation in policy analysis and in policy-making on good governance of global public goods, he said.

People’s participation in civil society awareness-building and policy formulation continues to grow, both in terms of quantity as well as of quality and depth of insight. “More people are actively seeking to be protagonists in designing how societies change and grow.”

These fundamental shifts in terms of practical ways of living democracy and international cooperation create a growing demand for non-traditional knowledge management and action-oriented training on social change trends, Dr. Calvani said.

The AIT-ASVI program reflects how the public sector, civil society and the private sector will cooperate to achieve the progress and well-being of peoples. It will start as a short training program and later develop into a full-fledged Professional Master’s program under AIT Extension, AIT’s ASEAN Regional Center on Millennium Development Goals (ARCMDG), Yunus Center at AIT, and CSR Asia Center at AIT. E-learning will be one of the means for conducting the program. ASVI and AIT will share profits and technical support for the program.

AIT source material

The abstract, which gives a view of the speech in the ‘Fundraiser 2012’ Italian National Conference is taken from ‘BUSINESS SOCIAL INNOVATION: starting from needs-new path and partnerships for social change’ by M. Crescenzi, a text for ASVI, copyright 2011. The work was born out of an international comparison with the Grameen network, the Italian profit sector, American opinion leaders like Jason Saul, the network of non profit managers and Italian and European Social Innovation.

As opposed to the general sense of precariousness and the scarcity of resources felt by many operators in the sector, we are convinced that the traditional three ‘markets’ – Public (Welfare, EU), Philanthropic (Donations) and Private, still offer enormous development potential for our organisations.

That is to say that providing we move making innovation of products, processes, digital communication and therefore. in general of management.  Considering the public sector more as a resource multiplier, rather than as a distributor.

For example, only on the private market, beyond any logic of a narrow target of the under-privileged, and adding the community request, building social added value which characterises our DNA as ‘social enterprises’, and entering the group of ‘unsatisfied requests’ (i.e. In Tourism), the volume of increase in the invoice level could be of various billions of euro, in Italy alone.

But be careful: in the strong evolution of the activity over the last few years, a new market clearly emerges, which we will define as ‘Social Business Innovation’ (or Social Innovation, or Social Capital Market, etc) extremely rich in enterprise opportunity, as well as different and new categories of stakeholders.

Big Players –such as Social Investment Funds, or the large international foundations such as that of Gates, or the ‘business partnership’ in Social Business of Yunus- that we could call ‘impact buyers’. Those interested in investing in the solution of social problems within an entrepreneurial logic; who consider fundraising an ineffective residual and the non profit organisations who are good at declaring the good cause, but not good at creating real and long-lasting social change.

The emergence of such a multiplicity of players and markets, which go beyond the three traditional “state”, “market” and “social private”, once and for all also buries the sense of the definition ‘third sector’, in which new and robust actors of social change cannot be traced.

To enter in what we have called the ‘social business-innovation market’ our organisations must learn to ‘sell’ their social impact, also built in terms of innovation, and easily measurable in terms of economic and social relapse.

The strategies of ‘Social Business Innovation’ comprise perceptible risks: for example, the companies and entrepreneurs, often millionaires, go ahead alone because they are convinced they will have better results (social impact) than ours- ‘nonprofit people’.

Better than donating money without security and without a specific control of the results, they prefer to invest on the basis of results of the measurable impact.

The non profit can ‘remain in play’ only if they are ‘business partners’ able to maximize the social impact of the programmes thanks to a knowledge of the needs, the territory, and the community.

All this requires re-profiling the managerial competence of the sector in an approach of result based management, with a focus starting with the activities to the results, from the generic ‘making a difference’ to quantifying, and the duration of the difference made.

Read more about the conference (italian site)

i-genius Asia Summit on social entrepreneurship, Bangkok, 1st – 2nd March 2012 under the theme, ‘Is Asia up to the challenge?’ will examine the potential for social innovation in the fastest growing region in the world and explore how it can be raised to an even higher level over the coming decade.

Professor Kriengsak Chareonwongsak will open the Summit with a lecture on ‘What the future holds for Asia’ and participants will then address seven challenges over the two days.

i-genius Asia Summit – 7 Challenges

Challenge 1: Swot Asia – identifying regional strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats

Challenge 2: Customers First! Expanding markets for sustainable growth

Challenge 3: Skills and Knowhow – making training and development relevant

Challenge 4: Finance and Investment – getting the cash to flow

Challenge 5: Designing a Legal and Regulatory Framework for Governments

Challenge 6: Developing Networks, Partnerships and Engaging Stakeholders

Challenge 7: Good Communications – awareness raising and generating media profile