Radical Ideas: RADIUS @ SFU

This week, Ken gets a “taste” of social innovation at Simon Fraser University’s RADIUS incubator, speaking with co-director Shawn Smith and social entrepreneur Dylan Jones about their work.

SFU’s Beedie School of Business established the RADIUS social innovation hub in 2013. (The name is an acronym for “Radical Ideas Useful to Society.”) Every year, RADIUS Fellows hosts emerging leaders in the social economy, and RADIUS ChangeLabs deliver extracurricular activities to SFU students. RADIUS’s Local Economic Development Lab (LEDlab) is working in Vancouver’s downtown eastside to build a more dynamic and inclusive economy (www.LEDLab.ca ). They helped turn an informal group of wastepickers and recyclers into The Binners Project, with its own brand, marketing, and business model for R&D, cartsharing, and event services. (Learn more at www.binnersproject.org ).

RADIUS Ventures delivers incubation support to startups at the business model validation stage, and acceleration support to growth-ready companies ready to attract venture capital. These social-purpose companies have potentially profitable business models, but also aim to improve society by addressing environmental sustainability, homelessness, and other social challenges. RADIUS “co-entrepreneurs” with the ventures, going deep and ensuring they provide a meaningful change in trajectory for the entrepreneur and the company.

One RADIUS venture was Zero Waste Market, Canada’s first package-free, zero-waste grocery store. (They changed their name literally days after this episode was completed, to Nada Grocery. Learn more at www.nadagrocery.com ). Another great example of a social enterprise incubated at RADIUS is Coast Protein, a sustainable energy bar and protein powder company (see www.coastprotein.com ).

Shawn observes that innovation can sometimes be challenging within a bureaucratic environment like a major public university. Entrepreneurs need to respect boundaries and structures, while remaining adaptive and responsive in an emergent space. RADIUS functions like a “skunkworks” at SFU, where risks can be taken, failures go quietly, and lessons can be learned. Academic innovators need their “pockets of innovation” to be protected from needless bureaucracy, and depend on “bridging innovators” in a wide range of departments, particularly in finance, to make their innovation work possible. Shawn emphasizes that SFU has a lot of these people, but that “they don’t always get the recognition they deserve.”

On the upside, though, a university setting provides a wealth of expertise and cutting-edge researchers in a wide range of disciplines, and an endless supply of enthusiastic students who deeply care about social issues and want to make the world a better place. Social incubators like RADIUS need to bring people together from disparate perspectives, to “bite off problems that people haven’t quite figured out yet,” and universities are an ideal setting in which to do that.