By Tessa Febiani
Following the success of ASEAN Social Enterprise Development Programme (SEDP) phase 1 and 2, the ASEAN Foundation, with support from TikTok and SAP, is implementing the ASEAN SEDP 3.0 in 2024 to empower social enterprises across the ASEAN region. This programme aims to provide customised capacity-building training and mentorship tailored to the needs of the participants, which are 30 young-led social enterprises based in Southeast Asia.
The first capacity-building training in the programme took place virtually on 11 June 2024, titled Social Lean Canvas: Building a Sustainable Business Model for Impact, with Rowan Yeoman as trainer. The primary objective of the training was to explore social lean canvas as a tool to integrate social mission into a business model. The method used in this training was a blend of interactive presentation, Q&A sessions, hand-on workshops, and case studies, to ensure all participants to engage more actively.
Rowan Yeoman is an entrepreneur, investor, and consultant, who has worked with numerous organisations across governments, NGOs, and large corporations to help model and make sense of complex innovation ecosystems and approaches. He has spent his career mapping, experimenting, facilitating, funding and executing across all aspects of the innovation landscape – understanding and leveraging the dynamics by which new ideas become valuable things that the world can benefit from.
Rowan co-created the Social Lean Canvas in 2013 and has developed it as a system for applying modern startup practices to purpose driven enterprises. Most recently, Rowan has been advising the UNDP to help map and understand the opportunities that Web3 innovation presents in the development and impact space to further the SDGs.
There are many definitions of social enterprise. However, in this case we use a very broad definition of an impact model and a business model being combined to produce social impact. A business model is described as an engine that can create, deliver, and capture value while managing costs at scale. Traditional business model focuses on creating, delivering, and capturing value while managing costs. Meanwhile, social enterprise business model adds a crucial element of delivering impact to traditional business model to achieve scale to their impact. Business model and impact model need to be combined into social business model. Iterating through a customer driven approach to evolve from risky assumptions to scalable repeatable social business model.
Social Lean Canvas can serve as a framework that holds all aspects in one place, allowing for a comprehensive understanding of the entire business. It integrates the business model and impact model into a system that assists social entrepreneurs in managing complexity of social business model.
This framework encourages social entrepreneurs to gain clarity regarding what they are and are not doing. Social lean canvas also provides a shared common language to understand, manage, and coordinate their team, advisors, investors or funders, and more. All the things related to developing business model can be found within the social lean canvas.
Participants in this training were encouraged to sketch out their business and impact model ideas in social lean canvas, share these models with team members, coaches, and advisors for feedback so they can improve the models and determine which ones are worth testing. They can also validate ideas by testing the biggest risks in each business with real customers.
This comprehensive training provided tools, knowledge, and case studies for participants to help them build sustainable, impact-driven business model for better social enterprises in the Southeast Asia region.
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