Frank Escoubès

Frank Escoubès harnesses the power of civic creativity to create a new market for citizen experts to contribute to public and private policy change. By channeling citizens’ knowledge in a structured process, everyday citizen changemakers become “inventors of a world that is possible” with direct influence on institutions that wouldn’t otherwise have access to this rich knowledge.

Frank is harnessing citizens’ creativity to influence large traditional institutions such as governments and businesses to solve social problems. He has created a new channel for citizens to influence public and private policy focused on social innovation. In particular, Frank seeks to transform the way that private and public sector consulting firms devise solutions and engage local citizens, who have the best understanding of the context, to collaborate with them. From supporting the citizen changemakers for their input to managing the relationships with multinational consulting firms who outsource to Frank’s organization, Frank and his organization bring citizens’ recommendations to influential public and private initiatives. This ensures they have high social impact and that contributors receive financial compensation in exchange for their skills. Further, by involving citizens in the consultation process, Frank is building the infrastructure for greater transparency in the implementation of public and private policy initiatives.

For each opportunity, Frank draws on a pool of citizen experts who have been sourced and vetted through his online wiki platform, a multilingual, searchable and editable knowledge base of creative social innovation projects, with the advanced functionality to make collaboration across the world user-friendly, intuitive and action-focused. Users can collaborate by forming online groups to tackle social problems, fostering an online and offline environment where creative ideas for solving social problems can germinate, incubate and be replicated through this open source vehicle. Then by finding partners on the ground in various countries, Frank complements the virtual technology, creating networks of local associations, which are the in-person continuation of the online collaboration. Frank is democratizing citizen participation ensuring that everyone can have a voice, be changemakers and collaborate with their peers around the world. Through mechanisms that ensure everyone has access to the tools to become changemakers online and offline, Frank is maximizing the use of civic creativity for social change.

Large and influential institutions such as governments and corporations look to consulting firms for strategic direction to address business problems, including contributing to social change in a strategic and financially attractive way. There are two main problems with this approach. First, there is a persistent lack of depth in consulting projects. There are often very tight deadlines, often just a few weeks to make large-scale recommendations on how a company or government should change their strategy that would have a considerable impact on people. Often these restrictions result in incomplete or inaccurate conclusions that could have implications for hundreds of thousands of people. Bringing citizens to fill these gaps in social and environmental consulting contracts from governments or companies could considerably improve the quality of decisions that are made. The second problem is that the beneficiaries of the new policies are too often not consulted in the decision-making and therefore, their stake in the issue is unknown. This can have a damaging impact on people due to the policies put in place. The absence of a structured marketplace poses a lost opportunity for input and potentially wasting hundreds of thousands of consulting dollars that could have generated income for citizens, as well as a high social impact.

Currently, there is no large-scale system in place to harness and leverage creative citizen knowledge to address social problems collaboratively with the business and public sectors. There are very few opportunities for business leaders and citizen changemakers to form business partnerships in order to co-transform business practices. There remains a clear divide between the civic community and corporate world. People who are changemakers have few ways to find and collaborate with their counterparts from around the world who are working on similar social problems alongside businesses and governments. At the same time, governments and businesses lack the specific skills to address continually changing social issues (that their business is implicated in) and have not successfully been able to interact with citizens in order to use their insights, experience and creativity to concretely add value to the problems they are working to solve. Citizens represent an untapped pool of creativity and inspiring experiences, which are currently being underused due to a lack of opportunities for citizens to participate in decision-making with businesses or governments.

An ever-increasing number of social entrepreneurs and citizens have developed skills and know-how that are underused, dormant or under-monetized. An overwhelming number of corporations and governments lack the specific skills and space to address current social problems in collaboration with leading social innovators and citizen experts that drive them to become more responsible and have a social impact.

After nearly 20 years as an innovation strategist with boutique and global management consulting firms, Frank was convinced that there were more creative ways to systemically support the business and public sectors to contribute effectively to social change. He launched Imagination for People (IP) in 2010 as his response to this gap in social problem-solving.

As he describes it, through IP Frank centers on four Ps: public, private, people, and partnerships. He is detecting, publicizing, and amplifying social creators and innovators who have developed specific skill-sets and know-how that could be leveraged in other contexts by corporations or governments. IP’s open source, wiki platform available online features three components: a wiki directory, a social network of initiatives, and collaborative work groups. First, the wiki showcases a directory of social innovations that meet three main criteria: they have achieved high social impact, are shareable and affordable; they are disruptive (for example, in their business model or service delivery model) and they have a high ability to scale. The platform is open source; there is no selection committee that decides which projects go up. Rather, the community decides, similar to the way Wikipedia operates with volunteer editors. Frank, in fact, has developed a partnership with the top business school in Montreal which has integrated volunteering for IP as part of their curriculum. Frank’s collaborative due diligence process ensures projects that meet the above criteria are featured on the site as inspiring models.

Frank’s social network of initiatives allows anyone to post “calls” for support, such as calls for specific competencies like web marketing, fundraising, creating hybrid legal structures, community managers, multiple stakeholder managers, and design thinkers. Other types of calls include open source hardware such as chips, solar panels, and computers, for due diligence work to evaluate projects using the peer network over a concentrated period of time, and calls for connectors, people are great at building partnerships and networks.

The third part of his online platform involves collaborative work groups, where people from around the world can create social change together in new and efficient ways. Rather than getting lost in large forums or other social media groups where discussions can be too long to navigate, Frank has reinvented the methodology for collaboration. He has developed a web interface that supports group members to more easily navigate and search for key information. Each group member has a role, such as orchestrator, curator, who catches the most important and relevant information, and mapper, who consolidates and creates a work plan. In each workgroup, members can choose different views to help best show the conceptual proximity of the projects and discussions, through tagging and “mouse-over” previews of chronological discussion. As an example, Tunisian bloggers in the social movement there have formed a workgroup on Frank’s site to build an open source national constitution that anyone can contribute to. Currently, Frank has 100 workgroups on his site.

Frank creates in-person links in order to continue the online platform offline by connecting with organizations involved or with a stake in the issues to be addressed during the consultation process. Around the world, group members participate in “IP associations”, where local workgroups tackle social challenges (there are three in France so far). Universities are also studying workgroups and transferring knowledge online in order to disseminate it.

Since IP is a network of networks, it operates through strategic partnerships with different communities including: linguistic communities such as the Organisation International de la Francophonie which includes 62 countries with French-speaking communities; territorial communities including www.good.is in the United States, Digital Empowerment Foundation which provides IP access to 2,500 entrepreneurs in India, and Ashoka Fellow Michel Venne’s Institut du Nouveau Monde in Canada. Other partners include: universities such as EM Lyon and École Normale Superieure in France; vertical communities including Millennia 2015, which is a UNESCO-sponsored initiative involving 8,000 women globally, the World Entrepreneurship Forum; and corporate communities including the European Ethical and Alternative Financing Company, which is the largest consortium of ethical banks in Europe.

As an innovation consultant for many years, Frank was determined to create concrete opportunities to change the industry to have a direct and more relevant social impact by involving citizens in co-creating solutions with businesses and governments. To complement his online platform, he designed a mechanism for citizen changemakers to monetize their knowledge, creativity, and skills through a direct channel to influence businesses and governments, in a unique process that Frank calls: Citizen to Business (C2B) and Citizen to Government (C2G) consulting. C2B and C2G involve crowdsourcing citizen expertise, or “smart-sourcing.” Frank is uniting the social innovation expertise of citizens with the specific needs of businesses and governments, thereby leveraging cutting-edge solutions that take into account new requirements and new stakeholders. For example, Frank has a strategic partnership with Deloitte in Montreal with which IP launched their pilot case. They won the $250,000 contract to advise the City of Montreal on how to become an innovation and technology hub. For this project, Frank brought together 15 citizen experts and social entrepreneurs, who were paid for their time and expertise. A report published by the city will make the recommendations public, spurring a wider public dialogue about the future social well-being of Montreal.

IP is structured as a social business that is currently made up of a non-profit (IP) and for-profit (IP & Co) whose sole objective will be to provide long-term funding for the non-profit online platform. The non-profit entity manages the activities of the web-based platform (development, content, community, events, etc.). The for-profit entity is gradually beginning to develop its core activity based on collaborative citizen consulting. The profits generated will serve to finance IP. Frank’s entities are incorporated in Canada and France, and he has plans to spread to other French and English-speaking countries in the coming years.

Through his new channels Frank envisions that this pioneer initiative will lead to citizen-expert-type micro-entrepreneurship and create a new market for citizen knowledge. Frank believes that business leaders, social entrepreneurs, and citizens need to form advisory partnerships in order to transform business practices to meet pressing social needs.

Frank’s model will bring policymakers, social entrepreneurs, and citizens together in order to find ways to combine their strengths to improve public systems. For example, the average size of a consulting contract is about $100,000. If IP & Co is to retain 30 percent of coordination fees, $70,000 will be shared amongst, say, 10 citizens or social entrepreneurs. It represents $7,000 per person for an average of 7 consulting days. Most social entrepreneurs and/or citizens do not have access to such financial capital. Multiplied by around 15 contracts per year handled directly through IP & Co, more than $1 million worth of potential fees could be paid to citizen consultants. IP & Co sold its first citizen consulting mandate to the City of Montreal for $250,000. Each year, Frank plans for hundreds more social innovations to be uploaded on the wiki platform, with the help of students and a team of editors. Currently, IP has 15,000 active users from 45 countries.

Born and raised in Lyons, Frank was exposed to innovation, social issues and learned to value creativity at a very young age. His mother was a scientist who conducted research on the first hydrogen cars, and his father was a surgeon. Frank’s father nurtured his artistic side and his mother encouraged him to pursue the sciences and make a strong contribution to society. His father had a big influence on him and passed away when Frank was 20, before his graduation from the Lyons School of Management and launching his career in management consulting.

Frank was a consultant in innovation strategy for nearly 20 years. He was determined to pursue how creativity could be made more useful in the field in order to contribute to social impact. Early in his career, Frank saw unethical behavior in the firms in which he worked. He also saw consultants providing advice to big corporations and governments with a stunning lack of awareness of the impact of their decisions. From 2002 to 2005, Frank’s work focused on industry clusters, which spurred his imagination on how entire industries can share resources and collective strategies for social impact. Frank realized there was a market for social innovation consulting involving everyday citizens. He was determined to create a bridge between business, governments, and citizens’ creativity for social change. In 2009, he created Imagination for People and in spring 2011, launched the beta site. That summer, Frank launched IP & Co.’s first citizen-led consulting partnership with the City of Montreal and Deloitte, one of Frank’s first corporate partners that believed that this field needed to be supported and organized. He has since left Deloitte, under whose auspices he originally launched the work, to dedicate himself full-time to his initiative of bridging the consulting field, public and private partners, and the citizen sector.