Many with great ideas of solving our local and global challenges aren’t able to take them further because they simply don’t know how to. We hear about talent, innovation and development being wasted due to lack of support or resources, but we also hear about those that are trying to change this. Susanna Nissar, one of our Impact Team members, is one of them and we caught up with her to hear more about how she’s trying to help more people build on their dreams to create positive change through her company Social Innovation Booster.

Hi Susanna, please tell us a bit about Social Innovation Booster and how it works!

Social Innovation Booster empowers change makers to design services that align with their purpose and with their users’ needs.

In our ‘Booster Programmes’ you learn how to build your innovation step by step so it aligns with a real market need. You get your own coach and mentor who is working hands-on with you through the entire development process with many of our participants claiming that their coach and mentor becomes like a team member, but ‘on-demand’ and risk free.

Why is it needed?

Our world is changing fast and we are forced to rethink our career, purpose and life. Lots of people have great ideas and suggestions for how to solve the complex challenges our world is facing, but don’t know where to start.

When developing a new idea or business, it helps a lot to simplify the complexity and involve the people that need to be involved in developing the solution. This is what service designers do! This expertise is usually only accessible to larger organisations that have the resources to work with consultants or have built up this expertise in-house.

I founded Social Innovation Booster with the aim of democratising the access to these tools and processes, making them available to anyone who has an impactful idea. It is such a great user centered approach, and very useful in all stages of entrepreneurship. The Booster Programmes are 100% online and open to anyone – there are no requirements and no application process; you just need to have an idea and a drive to make a difference.

What are the main benefits of going through this process?

Developing the right features from the start saves you time and money early in the process. In the Booster Programmes, you learn how to use user insights and build your innovation on these. When you develop a solution based on real user insights, you are more likely to build a relevant, purposeful and sustainable service or business.

What’s your background and how did you end up developing Social Innovation Booster?

I am a service and business designer and entrepreneur. I was one of the early adopters of service design and worked at Sweden’s first service design agency that grew very fast. I then started my own business, Expedition Mondial, together with two co-founders, Erik and Fredrik.

I worked for many years with the Swedish public sector helping them rethink and design their services to align with the needs of the citizens. When moving to Norrsken House, I started working with impact entrepreneurs, at accelerators like SE Forum’s, as a teacher and mentor. We merged the traditional lean startup approach with the service design/design thinking approach. I noticed how this framework helped entrepreneurs to build more relevant services and focus on developing the right features from the start.

Today I live in the San Francisco bay area and founded Social Innovation Booster to democratise the access to service and business design expertise. I wanted to support people who normally wouldn’t have access to this framework as I believe there are so many innovative solutions to our world’s complex challenges that can be unleashed if change makers get the confidence and the skills to design them!

What’s next for the Social Innovation Booster?

I am currently introducing new teachers and Booster Programmes on the platform! I’m very excited to soon be able to offer programmes run by my partners with a focus on Impact Modelling, Impact Branding and Marketing on the Social Innovation Booster platform. My dream is to provide an ‘on-demand team’ of highly skilled experts within different areas that can support change makers in building on their dreams to create positive change, through the programmes.

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Their next edition of Service Design for Impact starts on 27 October and if you’re keen to learn how to use service design to develop and improve your idea, we’re thrilled to offer all SE Forum members a 40% discount (299USD instead of 499USD) by using this link to register. The discount is valid also for upcoming editions of this programme, so please contact Susanna at susanna@innovationbooster.org if you have any questions. If you’re not a SE Forum member yet, it’s only 100SEK and you can register here.