Everyone can innovate! We strongly believe this as our credo in achieving beyond what we can do. It applies to everyone, including to farmers, blue collars, and agriculture labors. Innovesia has been fortunate to partner with local government of Pemda Kabupaten Tulang Bawang Barat (Tubaba) in Lampung Province to advise them on applying social innovation in their region.

Kabupaten (Regency) Tubaba is one of the newly established districts in Indonesia. Although it’s still in young age, Tubaba has been improving itself to achieve economic growth and equality to its people. The Regent, Bapak Umar Ahmad, as the leader of the regency, is a visionary man with full of ideas in his head to develop his regency. He understands that to achieve his dreams, he just cannot do it alone. He needs his people to work together to overcome the challenges, limitations and barriers. One of his main focus to tackle is to inception the right mindset and attitude of the people to have an innovative and “can do” mindset.

He started with recruiting and selecting Agent of Change from the community across the regency. Most of them are farmers, agriculture labors & traders, and active women. In total there are more than 1,000 agents of change recruited during January to May 2016. The Agent of Changes job is to empower social innovation in their community and neighborhood to achieve social economic prosperity. To set the right mindset of those Agent of Changes, they would need to be trained on the right method and approach.

Innovesia was invited to run a series of workshops on Social Innovation using Human Centered Design, to more than 1,000 Agent of Changes in 5 districts. The workshops were conducted in May 2016 in 4 centers and covered all municipals in the regency. Innovesia partnered with the local government to facilitate all Agent of Change in embracing the social issues and then to find solutions.

At first, we adjusted our Human Centered Design module to the knowledge level of the Agent of Change. As the objective was to equip them with the right approach in understanding social issues and then to generate ideas and solution to be implemented. We emphasized heavily in our workshop with them to have the right understanding of “can do” attitude to solve problems in our neighborhood. It’s also important for the Agent of Change that they should be more Empathetic to the community’s needs and demands. With a down-to-earth approach, we taught them on how to listen and observe their neighborhood, in essence of any occurring social problem.