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Addressing Wicked Problems with Debra Lam
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Addressing Wicked Problems with Debra Lam
If, like me, you love solving complicated problems, you might be familiar with the idea that the bigger an issue, the more money you can make off of it. But what about those really big problems? Those society-wide, no-solution-in-sight problems?
It’s easy to assume that as a leader of a small or mid-sized business, there’s not much you can do in the face of these types of challenges. However, a recent guest on a bonus episode of The Business of Tech believes that folks like us have a role to play – even when the problem seems never-ending.
Debra Lam is the founding director of The Partnership for Inclusive Innovation, which organizes public-private partnerships to solve society’s biggest issues at a community level.
Want to turn your organization into a force for good (while finding new ways to make money)? Here’s what she shared during our recent interview:
Lam’s Mission
Lam kicked off our convo by explaining the tagline for the Partnership for Inclusive Innovation: a public-private partnership that catalyzes innovation for shared economic prosperity. She and her team see innovation as a continuous improvement, defining inclusive innovation as increasing access and opportunities for everyone to innovate. They fundamentally believe that innovation leads to more economic prosperity, so the ability to innovate needs to be shared more widely.
So what does this mean in practice? Lam did a TEDx talk on the idea of ‘wicked problems’ seeming super insurmountable, but that one of the ways to address them is through local partnerships and innovations.
The idea behind this theory is that complex problems like poverty, homelessness, and climate change can’t be solved by one entity:
“We really need to boil down more at the local level and think more holistically about who are the other organizations, actors that could get involved, to not only work together on it, but share the risk and really leverage the resources together to address the problem.”
Leveraging Technology
I asked Lam to explain how, exactly, technology can be utilized in a partnership to tackle these ‘wicked problems.’
In short, they think of technology as a tool, but they don’t start with the tool – they start with the problem. After all, you don’t grab a hammer, then look for a nail to hit. You start with the nail.
When her team identifies the problem they want to solve, they see technology as one of the tools in a wider toolkit, which includes public policy, business models, and community engagement.
Here’s a concrete example for you: Lam and her team are teaming up with Georgia Tech and the Morehouse School of Medicine to help the city of Atlanta solve the problem of energy poverty in a low socio-economic neighborhood. Tenants are paying a lot more in energy costs than wealthier neighborhoods because landlords aren’t doing their part to complete cost-saving upkeep.
The team’s solution was to fly drones to conduct energy audits in the neighborhood to identify areas worth targeting and prioritize the needs of the community. This tactic, which hadn’t been done before this project, fits in Lam’s earlier definition of why innovation leads to better economic outcomes.
Finding the Right Stakeholders
As technologists, we live for this kind of innovation. But I wanted to know more about how these initiatives actually get started, so I asked how she goes from identifying the problem to getting the right people in the room.
Her answer is simple: relationship building.
She illustrated this with another project, this time related to public safety. The city of Warner Robins, Georgia, needed a better way to protect their community with dwindling public safety resources. So, Lam and her team worked with Georgia Tech to identify another researcher from Middle Georgia State. This person was able to underpin the initiative with social science research, ultimately painting a more holistic picture of the community’s nuanced needs.
By moving things from a theoretical conversation to an on-the-ground blend of hard science and soft science, the resulting tactics actually saw a 30% reduction in crime.
Now, we were still missing the private partnership portion of the conversation, so I asked Lam how that bit comes in. Turns out, there was another actor involved in the Warner Robins example: a startup unicorn called Flock. Their license plate reading and camera technology was an active partner in the project, too.
The AI Factor
Of course, I couldn’t get through a conversation like this without bringing up AI. When I asked Lam how AI can influence the type of public-private partnerships she oversees, she explained that its biggest impact is in workforce development.
“For a lot of the younger generation, it’s hard for them to get a first job if they don’t have work experience, and if they don’t have work experience, they can’t get a first job… [but] this next generation of innovators can be on the forefront of AI.”
They even have a whole vertical focused on AI manufacturing where they explore how it could “advance with higher jobs, more outreach, more growth, and really provide better needs for the community as we go.”
How to Get Involved
Want to explore how your own organization can benefit from these public-private partnerships? Lam has a few recommendations:
Talk to higher ed centers (technical colleges, small private schools, big universities, etc), who often have research and innovations in development that could use a partner’s help.
Get involved in local governments by going to town halls, chamber of commerce meetings, rotary clubs, etc. They often need leading players with technical expertise.
Look into rural communities. It’s often easier to innovate here with fewer bureaucratic challenges.
Finally, I asked what factors folks like us should keep in mind in order to be as effective as possible in these partnerships. I’ll leave it with her answer:
“Bring an open mind, but also bring a problem – like you might have a problem, you can’t solve it, you might not know the answer to it. See if you can ask another sector or another organization to work on it together. I think having a problem brings people together, and they might have the same problem or a similar problem, and really trying to tackle that problem, I think, is a great way to start that process. It’s about building trust and building relationships.”