By David Campbell

This article originally appeared in the Telegraph Journal on October 15 2014

I spend my days thinking about how places like New Brunswick can attract more multinational firms, foster more ambitious entrepreneurs and attract high-impact talent to help build the strong economic foundation that underpins our broader community and social objectives.

Nick Scott, acting Executive Director of the New Brunswick Social Policy Research Network, spends his days thinking about how we might be able to address some of our most intractable social challenges such as our low literacy rates, below-average health profile and chronic poverty among certain socioeconomic segments of our population.

In reality the two are inextricably connected. New Brunswick’s longterm economic problems are both a cause and an effect of our social challenges.

Nick recently pointed me to an excellent book that highlights an emerging approach called the“solution economy”that involves applying private sector and market concepts along with cutting-edge technologies to solve previously intractable social problems.

The book, entitled The Solution Revolution: How Business, Government and Social Enterprises Are Teaming Up to Solve Society’s Toughest Problems, was written by two Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited consultants: William D. Eggers and Paul Macmillan.

One of the strengths of the book is that it is full of examples of how the solution economy can work. From reducing vehicle congestion on California highways to eliminating malaria in Africa, Eggers and Macmillian make a compelling case for bringing the business community, social entrepreneurs and government together to solve the biggest challenges.

There are a number of powerful ideas in this book. The authors discuss what they call “multirational multinationals”or global companies that believe they should be actively working to address social problems and turn those very problems into market opportunities.

While some, like Canada’s anti-corporate crusader Naomi Klein, believe multinational firms are the source of many of our problems, Eggers and Macmillian see them as a key part of the solution. They suggest the multinationals can“scale social innovations faster and more widely than other institutions can”.

The books includes a lot of examples of new pay-for-success business models such as social impact bonds.

One of the most interesting trends discussed in the book is the rise of distributed problem solving via the Internet. The book cites the example of Kaggle, an online platform that uses competitions to solve societal problems.

In one example competition, Kaggle provided entrants (teams of data scientists from around the world) with thousands of hand-scored essays from across the United States.

The competitors had to build a software tool that would read and grade the essays without human intervention. The team that best matched the scores given by the human graders won a $100,000 prize.

Instead of paying one software firm to attempt to solve this problem, the Kaggle competition involved dozens of teams from around the world working on the problem for a fraction of the cost of the traditional approach. Kaggle is being used for everything from predicting epileptic seizures to improving credit scoring.

If you want to find out more about the solution economy, you can pick up the book or better yet you can register for the upcoming GovMaker Conference in Fredericton on Nov. 24 and 25. Paul Macmillan, co-author of The Solution Revolution, is a keynote speaker and will be expounding on this award-winning book and concept.

GovMaker will bring academic researchers, policymakers as well as members of the public, private and not-for-profit sectors to explore open data and open government and its impact on New Brunswick.

If we want to start developing the solution economy to address New Brunswick’s social challenges, open data and open government will be key.

Maybe it’s time to stop complaining about our social and economic challenges and start working to solve them.

DAVID CAMPBELL davidwcampbell.com  An economic development consultant based in Moncton