Date: 7th of December 2021
Time: 10:35am to 12:00pm
Venue: Storey Hall, RMIT
Session Type: Panel
Participants: Sue Boyce (AbilityWorks), Dr Warren Staples (University of Melbourne), Paul Ashby (Aurecon, waiting for his confirmation), Dr Joanne Meehan (University of Liverpool, UK) and Sebastian Conley (Transurban)

The panel will be moderated by Dr Kevin Argus (RMIT) and Dr. Natalya Turkina.

 Dr Kevin Argus

Lecturer Design Thinking and Marketing

MBA Program Manager

Graduate School of Business and Law

RMIT University

I lead industry engagement within the Graduate School of Business and Law at RMIT. We engage industry and government to create shared value for all stakeholders. This includes in-class projects (design innovative ideas), academic research (enabling rigorous experimentation and storytelling with impact to showcase innovation in industry) and consulting practices (where expert academics provide independent evaluation and recommendations on specific industry projects). Every stakeholder engagement involves mutual value exchange. I pride myself on learning the value that all stakeholders desire from collaborative partnerships, and design projects around mutual value with agreed deliverables (including shared value partnerships). 

 Our current industry partner research within the construction industry is informing best practices in social procurement including impact measurement. This project is guided by a novel approach to creating shared value with a human-centred design lens, incorporating supply chain partnerships representing marginalised workers to co-design shared value in alignment with the Victorian Government Social Procurement Framework policy.

Topic: “Beyond ‘Box-Ticking’: Institutional Challenges and Opportunities for Australian Social Procurement”.

Synopsis: The COVID-19 crisis has significantly hit Australia, bringing in the first economic recession since the 1990s along high un- and under-employment rates, especially amongst the vulnerable, disadvantaged, or marginalised groups of people (e.g., women and youth at risk, refugees and migrants, people with disabilities, indigenous people). To recover from this crisis, the Victorian Government has prioritised social procurement as a promising strategy for creating meaningful long-term employment. Social procurement is a framework for organisations to use their buying power to generate social value for local communities above and beyond the economic value of goods or services being purchased. This can be achieved via direct procurement from social enterprises or by including social impact or employment assessment in the tender requirements. However, Australian firms tend to take a short-term ‘box-ticking’ approach to social procurement by merely complying to minimum contractual requirements instead of creating meaningful long-term business and employment opportunities in the local communities. During this Panel discussion, we will discuss what institutional (i.e., political, cultural, financial) challenges inform such a ‘box-ticking’ approach and what institutional opportunities lie ahead of Australian social procurement.