 Everyone's different here at the Canopy Workspace, different organisations, projects and specialisms. But here inside the Entopia building there's also a common goal that brings us together. There's a collective desire to accelerate change and sustainability is at the heart of it. The Canopy is all about collaboration, a community sharing and learning from each other's experiences. And this is Canopy Connect, a podcast where you can get to know your fellow members at the Canopy. This time on the podcast. Hi, I'm Justin Dekalsmowski. I'm the UK Managing Partner for Archipelago. I'm also a fellow at the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership. So, let's connect. So my background is largely corporate. I started my career as a quote unquote bog standard strategy consultant. So working, this is in the late 90s, kind of a lot of e-commerce and dot com work that was sort of exploding at that time. And then came around to focusing on sustainability and in particular social innovation and social impact as part of an interesting area around business and poverty, business and equality issues. And that's work that I came into later in my 15 years, if you like, into my career and have been doing now for 20 or so, just to age myself a little bit. And so worked in that sphere, kind of social innovation and social impact for companies within SC Johnson where I built and ran a portfolio, if you like, what we would today call social innovation programs. We then called it base of the pyramid or responsible sourcing or those kinds of things. So, you know, pick your buzzwords. And then from there moved on to Puma where I headed up a sustainability from the strategy team. So this was really looking at how can we embed sustainability in the product and innovation engine of the organization. There was a team pre-existing me and doing a great job from a compliance and human rights and labor perspective in our supply chain. We wanted to do more in terms of how we built product, how we made product, how we marketed product. And then from there I went to Ovo Energy and headed up sustainability for them for a couple of years as they were really scaling up and then moved on to essentially help the friend with a startup and then joined Archipelago to create the UK office roughly six years ago. So Archipelago is essentially a French company. I am the American in the otherwise French sauce and started in Paris about 12 years ago by David Menache and a partner of his at the time and was focused on what we then were calling base of the pyramid initiative. So kind of how can business engage in lower income communities for both commercial and social impact. And that remains at the core. We've evolved and expanded as has that whole space. Hardly anyone uses the terminology of base of the pyramid anymore, but we've evolved into more of a social innovation and kind of corporate impact strategy offering. And I have partners, you know, all the other partners are in Paris and there are five other partners, 20 some odd individuals and consultants in Paris, four of us here in the UK, two in Dakar, two in Mumbai. So, you know, an international company, but still within the sort of 30 plus total human beings working for it. And we also operate massively and very often with partners in various markets. But where their business is running into social issues is that's both from a potentially from a risk perspective or from an impact perspective. So that might be the supply chain, you know, buying product from smallholder farmers, buying waste material from informal waste pickers, for instance, as a real example of work we've done in the recycling space. So it's where their business is naturally engaging with an at risk or a potentially vulnerable population and helping the company understand the impact and that population, that community better and therefore to design better solutions or better ways of engaging, whether that's an incentive scheme or a new product. And then helping also execute. And that's one of the things that I really like about our work at our Compellico and the way we engage with our clients is that we're not just coming up with the ideas, doing the research. We're doing that work, but also really happy to hold their hands. We all have operational and executional backgrounds and therefore we're really excited to sort of work with a client all the way through to pilot testing and scaling projects. So we get into the tools, we get into the kind of hands on work of really scaling and pushing these programs out to hopefully to the world or as much scale as we can go for. We really don't want to get bogged down in small ball kind of, you know, working with clients who are sort of doing this on the side of their business. We really want to be there and helping our clients embed this in the way they go to market, in the way that they operate, because that's, from my perspective, the way that business can truly have a positive impact at scale is going to be by embedding different approaches that have social innovation, social impact, thinking at the core of the way that they're designed. I think one of the big opportunity areas that we see, and it also comes back to sort of the way that we're often working is we're often engaging with teams who are really business focused. We see a brand team who have identified their purpose, but they're not experts in social innovation. They're not experts in social impact, whether that's trying to impact the water situation or air quality in India, for instance, to give a live example. But the brand team are great at selling their product, understanding their consumer, making deals with retailers, like all those kind of core elements of a consumer goods brand team. They're phenomenal at that world class. But when you start to try to get them to engage with NGOs, with the public sector, with maybe the educational sector, that's where they're outside of their comfort zone. It's understandable. So that's quite often where we're helping a very business focused and super capable team just expand their capabilities a bit, whether we're bringing those to the table as part of the team or helping to build tools and build their capabilities so they can take it forward. That depends. So we're helping very business focused teams think somewhat more socially and act more socially and engage with the social sector, the public sector, social enterprise, et cetera, much more effectively. But then on the other end of the spectrum, we're sometimes working with either parts of organizations or partners, whether that's a social enterprise or a team within the company who are entirely focused on social impact and social innovation. We're also often helping them think more business focused so they can embed the work that they're doing and the way that they think in the way the business does its day-to-day operations. So I guess the answer is one of the key skill sets that I think we bring and I think we're seeing develop and seeing be more and more necessary is a breadth of ways of thinking. And it complicates it. It's absolutely more difficult to do it this way. But it's critical if we're going to address some of the core issues that are embedded in the SDGs or to create a society that we all want to live in. We need those who are more socially minded and socially capable thinking with business and embedding business approaches and the sustainability of business from an economic perspective at least in their approach and those who are pure business to not be so pure business but also think, okay, what's our social impact? How can we maybe tweak what we're doing or improve what we're doing so that we have a much more positive social impact so that we reduce the negative social impact we might be having, et cetera? So yeah, I think that's the evolution that we're certainly trying to be a part of is just a more hybrid way of thinking across business and social. In terms of the give-get with Canopy for me, I am really eager to learn more from all the other members in terms of what are they doing and how are they doing it and what are the challenges and what have they done that's worked really well, what have they tried that's not worked really well, and that kind of thing takes trust and time. So I think for me being here and whether that's around a cup of coffee or specific meeting events or whatever, I think I'm really eager to learn from the others and absolutely share whatever it is that I can offer into that mix. Share those learnings is a key element. Absolutely happy if collaborations can come out of it, et cetera. That'd be fantastic. As I mentioned on a lot of our projects, we're quite often working with experts in their fields and I'm sure that there'll be some of those in the community as well. I am more than happy to continue the conversation. So we've got a website, archipel-co.com, which gives you more on our approach and a few case studies and those kinds of things there. Certainly I am the only D. Kosmowski on LinkedIn so if you can possibly get the last name spelled right, you will find me on LinkedIn. And that's a good way to get me as well. Thanks for checking out this episode of Canopy Connect. Log in to your office R&D profile to connect with your Canopy neighbors. Just head to the members page and find them. This is a Canopy podcast made by Newell-Lotman. The Canopy is part of Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership supported by the European Regional Development Fund. Thank you for listening.