We are currently planning the next activities and key steps for the Social Venture's Community of Practice (CoP) moving forward. It has been a fantastic year getting people from across the sector to engage in best practice and policy environment in social venture building and SHAPE commercialisation, so let’s take a look at what is coming up.
First, a huge thanks to everyone that took part in any way over the last 12 months, either in the online webinars, the regional meets, the surveys or any of the other diverse interactive activities. To see the representation of this work bloom with a dedicated track being possible and well received in our latest conference was a huge sign of the development of this topic and how this more impactful focussed Knowledge Exchange (KE) is becoming a normalised part of our sector.
As we move forward, we will continue to run online events to share case studies and break them down together as a community. Our focus will be more dedicated to social venture building, but SHAPE disciplines are a massive part of this and will be more than welcome as we explore disclosure forms, legal structure/business model planning and sector policy initiatives.
Our online platform has a skeleton structure now reflecting the organisation of topics into key categories that came up in conversations with the Community. We are ready now to populate the platform with signposting to key case studies, discussions and resources across ‘Engaging Academics’, Technical Process’, ‘Metrics/Sector Policy’ and ‘Professional Development’.
The next important aim over the upcoming year is to promote self-driven governance of the CoP. It is a pleasure to be coordinating support and exchanges between members, and hearing what is happening across the landscape is hugely encouraging. However, to create substantive cultural change we need members to champion this work and tailor the general principles to groups of HEIs that are either local, or working in similar challenges and/or venture types anywhere in the world.
An extension of this is the promotion of CoP work in the places where sector culture is celebrated and valorised. As we have already seen, our conference and others are excitingly making impactful KE and social ventures an expected part of their programmes. We are also dedicating a category in our KE awards this year to Social Ventures. This will be an ongoing part of CoP activity as we promote ways for members to spotlight their own work, scale up collaborations with key stakeholder types and submit to conferences and awards.
I can’t wait to get going in building these activities over the next 12 months, but as always it will completely driven by your needs and your work.
You can make sure you get your voice heard as our CoP survey is still open https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/FPCHCK7
