Dr. Niven Huang On Growing Social Innovation In The Asia Pacific Region
Dr. Niven Huang is the Managing Director of KPMG Sustainability Consulting Co., Ltd., the Taiwan Regional Leader of KPMG Sustainability Services in Asia Pacific and Regional Leader, KPMG ESG Asset Management Services in Asia Pacific. Niven is the lead organiser of the 2020 Asia Pacific Social Innovation Partnership Award (APSIPA).
Niven has extensive experience in CSR and contributes his expertise across various roles, including
Member of Advisor Board of NDCI.global
Sitting on the judging panels of several public and private Awards of CSR, Excellence in Environment, and Sustainability in Taiwan and Asia, including the Asia Responsible Entrepreneurship Awards since 2015.
A part time Associate Professor of several universities in Taiwan for teaching CSR and corporate sustainability, including the most leading advanced MBA and EMBA at National Cheng Chi University, since 2008.
Consultant of Acer CSR Office
Committee member of CPC CSR Committee.
Among other experience, Niven is a Council member for National Council of Sustainable Development and holds a Ph.D. & M.S. from the Graduate School of Chemical Engineering, Chung Yuan Christian University.
Niven discusses The Broad Social Innovation Movement Sweeping Taiwan and the upcoming asia Pacific social Innovation Summit and partnership awards.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Tom Allen] - Niven, thank you very much for joining us today.
[Niven Huang] - Thank you so much Tom.
Niven, could you please share a little bit about your background, and what led to your passion in social innovation?
My major is in chemical engineering. After graduating in my PhD program, I then worked in environmental engineering, especially in waste management technology developing the thermo-technology for dealing with waste management. Most of my projects were focusing on combustion and incinerating waste and turning all of the waste into carbon dioxide. After 1992 to 1997, because of the climate change issues, I did the United Nations framework on climate change to bring a little more attention to the global warming issue. Then, I gradually turned my attention to the climate change issue in 1997 to transfer my environmental engineering career into business and corporate services sustainability.
I joined the Business Council for Sustainable Development and had a new role to be based in Taiwan as the Secretary General. I worked in Taiwan with this platform combining a lot of Taiwanese big companies and corresponding to what the Business Council for Sustainable Development had already worked on.
Simple things like eco-efficiency, CSR issues, energy, climate, trade and environmental ecosystems et cetera. I had the role as the Secretary General for BCSD Taiwan for 16 years. Then I joined KPMG in 2013.
Now, I'm in charge of climate change and sustainability for KPMG in the Asia Pacific. I also have another new role, focusing on social enterprise and social innovation. That is my brief background in sustainability and social innovation.
Wonderful. It's a long and distinguished career Niven, and it's wonderful to have your expertise throughout the globe and in your position in the Asia Pacific. Now you're the organiser for the Asia Pacific Social Innovation Partnership Awards, (APSIPA). I'd love to hear a little bit more about what APSIPA's vision is and what you've been doing with the awards?
APSIPA, the partnership award, is a unique award that explores dynamic social innovation models in the Asia Pacific. This award is a very good platform to connect diverse stakeholders that are dedicated to social innovation for working out social and environmental problems in the Asia Pacific, to deliver significant social impact and also achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The second goal is we hope all the successful models for partnership or business cases in the Asia Pacific through the platform of APSIPA can be duplicated in other regions or other countries in the Asia Pacific. We anticipate that a lot of similar social and environmental problems need to be worked out.
That's why we created APSIPA, to try to honour and identify very outstanding things and create successful social innovation partnerships. It can be very good for others to learn, to share, to inspire and to motivate more entrepreneurs, business and opinion leaders in our society to work together.
It's a fantastic awards program. Could you speak a little bit more about the role that APSIPA plays in promoting social innovation in the Asia Pacific region please Niven?
The first one is we are the first award in the Asia Pacific that promotes partnership and collaboration among multiple stake holders. With this unique setting of the award, the participants have been more and more diverse. We have noted that more different kinds of stakeholders through our partners or judges in different part of the regions are of different kinds of backgrounds. Stakeholders have an interest to participate in this award, and I think that is a really good thing. Now we motivate more different kinds of backgrounds of stakeholders in social innovation, to join a collaborative force, contribute their effort, and then to bring us their outstanding cases to this platform.
The second one is we also see APSIPA integrates different kinds of people, resources and outstanding experiences. In this platform, based on the learning by sharing or learning by doing, we notice that, for example, this year we have participants from 16 countries. That is really great in the Asia Pacific. It can be regarded as a real Asia Pacific base, with a learning by doing and learning by sharing platform. Then through APSIPA we look forward to the mission I just mentioned.
We would like to motivate and inspire more people in the Asia Pacific to join the solution pursuing process, for working out the social and environmental problems in the Asia Pacific.
You're in a great position in that you have exposure to so many excellent initiatives happening in the Asia Pacific.
What are your observations of the social innovation movement currently in Taiwan?
I think feeding back into my observations for this, I would like to also highlight the different stakeholders in social innovation. First of all, it's for the government. I believe that every Asian country all have the same situations of the domestic or local social and environmental issues have become more and more serious for the government to take it very seriously when dealing with those issues. For government of course, the policy framework for building up a much more friendly ecosystem for social innovation is very important.
The government also can motivate the key players in the ecosystem for social innovation. For example, they can motivate colourful big companies to support social innovation through social procurement.
Here in Taiwan, the Taiwanese Government not only just focuses on the infrastructure for a friendly ecosystem for social innovation, but also, they put a lot of effort into initiating a social procurement award.
It's called buying power, and then in the last few years we noticed government advocacy has the buying power for motivating small, medium or big companies to get involved and support social innovation. For supporting the entrepreneur, social enterprise has already achieved very good progress. We noticed that the social procurement per month increased very significantly. Currently, we have already had almost more than 10 million US dollars of social procurement in Taiwan. The second one is for the big company just following the buying power awards motivation, and a Taiwanese solicitor company have higher interest in social innovation and social procurement. Then, another new development is because of the CSR and ESG developments in Taiwan. This company now highly welcomes a new partnership with the social entrepreneurs on the social innovation program for supporting the big company’s CSR program.
The third one is for social enterprise.
Social entrepreneurs right now have seen that the younger generation after 2020 are a much more social purpose driven generation.
When we look at the problem and the issue in the social and environmental area, the younger generation do have a stronger passion than the older generation in starting up social enterprises.
We need to combine the new trends in this area and leverage the different kinds of stakeholders in this area. Then, we need to build up a much better platform for them to talk to each other, work with each other, build up the partnerships, and even build up business partnerships between the companies and the social entrepreneurs.
Absolutely. There's some really interesting insights there Niven, thanks for sharing those. I'm really keen to hear a bit more about some of the inspiring projects or initiatives that you've come across which you believe are creating some great positive social change?
If we talk about new initiatives recently, I think they are 100% related to COVID-19. The COVID-19 outbreak has already caused quite serious economic lock down, but fortunately in Taiwan, the economic activity, school and entertainment support has seemingly not been affected significantly. That is a good thing for Taiwan, and Taiwan is a quite unique situation anyway. We are lucky, but we still need to do something related to COVID-19. To be frankly speaking, even Taiwan has only just had a small impact by COVID-19. But, because of uncertainty, a lot of initiatives and a lot of effort for the first part of 2020, for example, the big companies’ CSR programs and ESG initiatives became a little bit more conservative. A lot of social enterprise businesses indeed were impacted because of uncertainty. Under the support of a small size enterprise administration, this government agency is under the Ministry of Economic Affairs here in Taiwan. At KPMG, we have welcomed a new initiative called Power Taiwan Gift Boxes. What it means is we convened a bunch of social enterprises and we invited 26 social enterprises. They worked together and then KPMG provided supporting resources based on their product and service, and then we designed the Power Taiwan Gift Box.
There are at least four, five or six different kinds of products supplied by those 26 social enterprises, and then we designed four kinds of Power Taiwan Gift Boxes. Then we promoted and introduced those Gift Boxes to the big companies, banks or financial institutions, and even government agencies.
They encourage those kinds of key stakeholders to purchase the Power Taiwan Gift Boxes, to represent their support for those social enterprises during COVID-19. It is quite a warm and inspiring initiative.
Up until now, we already have more than 1000 boxes. The social enterprises and other key players related to this Power Taiwan Gift Box are all very excited because based on the promotion, we see a lot of positive feedback from those big companies, government agencies or opinion leaders that is completely based on the impact of a COVID-19. We would like to deliver our positive messages during even a difficult time, and we still have a lot of people in society that are willing to support social enterprises.
The second initiative, is we work with the Taipei Government to support Taipei City social enterprises. What we are doing right now is we are building up a new platform, and we are inviting big companies to the platform to provide [and share] their problems. Then we invite a social entrepreneur to understand they're big companies and big problems, and then we invite those social entrepreneurs to provide a solution. It's something like a problem identifier and solution provider, and a matchmaking plan. That is quite an interesting initiative, and it's undergoing at this moment. We’ve invited six or seven big companies to join the initiative. Then we have more than 20-30 social entrepreneurs in Taipei City, and with the support over the Taipei City Government, we are going to launch a ceremony.
This ceremony is also a learning by sharing event, to see how big companies can work with social enterprises based on the problem identified by the big company and solution identified by the social entrepreneur.
This is kind of new for me, but it's also a partnership program, and we anticipate that we can come out with some very good and inspiring successful cases of this kind of partnership.
There are some great initiatives there Niven, and I must say I've always been really encouraged by the high delegation numbers in participation from Taiwanese delegates at the Social Enterprise World Forum each year. I always hear fantastic stories of all the great initiatives happening, both across the private and public sectors in your country.
To finish off Niven, what books or resources would you recommend to our listeners?
At this moment, I don't have any books I can recommend, but I do have some resources, especially for what we are doing and also our partner organisations across the Asia Pacific. The first one, is we are organising the 2020 Asia Pacific Social Innovation Summit, from September 21st-25th. You can get access to English information through the website for the details about this social innovation summit. The second one is for the Social Innovation Partnership Award in the Asia Pacific.
We do work with a lot of social innovation partners in Asia.
The first partner is the Asian Philanthropy Venture Network, (APVN).
The second one is Social Venture Hong Kong.
The third one is the Global Social Economy Forum, and this is based in South Korea.
The fourth partner is the Centre for Social Initiatives Promotion (CSIP) from Vietnam.
My fifth recommendation is the Manila Impact Hub. It is everywhere in Asian countries, but now the regional office is based in Manila.
The last one is from Singapore, The Singapore Centre for Social Enterprise with the abbreviation raiSE.
These six organisations are our partners in the Asia Pacific region. Please get access through their websites and you will find out a lot of very good information for your reference.
Niven, it's been a pleasure to talk to you today. Thanks so much for sharing all of those great initiatives. We encourage our listeners to go and take a look at some of that great work happening in the Asia Pacific.
We wish you the best of luck with the APSIPA Awards, and also in preparation for the Asia Pacific Social Innovation Summit this year. It's going to be a great summit and it'll be great for our audience to head over there and take a look at the work that you are all doing.
This content is sponsored by Small and Medium Enterprise Administration, Ministry of Economic Affairs, Taiwan.
