05 Mar Invited Lecture: Development Engineering Research and Practice Seminar at UC Berkeley
Berkeley, California
March 20, 2017
Invited Lecture: Dev Eng 210.
The Meaning and Measure of Social Impact
Monday, March 20th at 1:00 p.m.
Increasingly, engineers, entrepreneurs, designers, investors, academics, and other innovators are working to create social impact. Their efforts span the public and private sectors, and may be sustained by market demand, charitable giving, or both. Yet, even as their ranks swell and their efforts scale, one question seems to go unasked: What is social impact?
In this presentation, I explore various meanings of impact and what makes it social. I consider the conditions under which impact may be desirable and should be pursued. Then I connect these ideas to strategies that innovators may use to measure impact.
Although the challenge of measuring social impact is familiar, the contexts in which innovators work are new. To keep pace, the methods of measuring impact will also need to innovate, opening a new frontier for evaluation.
Location: 100 Blum Hall, UC Berkeley