Mind Your Own Business (MYOB)
The organisation Mind Your Own Business (MYOB) is organising and facilitating development projects for young boys, between the age of 13 and 19, from marginalised housing areas. The program is centred around entrepreneurship and, in cooperation with voluntary venture pilots from civil society and business partners, the young boys are given the opportunity to start their own micro-enterprise. The philosophy behind MYOB is that the program further develops the professional and social competencies of the young boys and thereby enables a stronger association to the educational system and the job market.
Stakeholders & Beneficiaries
To be able to operate, Mind Your Own Business relies on a well-developed network of volunteers, mentor companies, non-profit housing associations, and public sector collaborators. The program is based on external funding. The main beneficiaries are the youngsters who participate in the program.
Co-creation process
Internally the program relies on a form of organising where there is no specific owner of the process and hence decision-making is made jointly among the actors involved – MYOB employees are solely acting as facilitators. A such, the program is itself based on a logic of co-creation.
Digital Transformation Process
No digital transformation process is going on.
Results, Outcomes & Impacts
To MYOB, the overall aim of the program is personal development of the boys, based on the understanding that the competences they gain from participating can be transferred to other contexts and hence increase their social and professional abilities, also prospectively.
Challenges & Bottlenecks
Historically, the main barriers are related both to the internal and the external environment of the program. Internally the boys are struggling with both low support and understanding from their families and with the acceptability from the other boys in their neighbourhood. Externally the adult lack of confidence in the competences and abilities of the boys is leading to mistrust. Hence, a barrier is to change the ‘outside’ story of the boys. Nevertheless, these barriers seem to decrease both during the course of a program and since the success stories of the program are now spreading.
Transferability & Replicability
At the moment the program is starting out in Greenland, and despite the need to develop and tailor the process to a new context the main idea does not seem difficult to transfer.
Success Factors
The process and the learning of the boys in the program are the main success criteria, but also there is an awareness that, from the perspective of the boys, an important success criterion is related to the micro-enterprises – the aspect of entrepreneurship is crucial for the boys to become engaged.
Lessons learned
MYOB is based on a planned network to function. As such the relationship building, and hence trust among actors, has been key in developing a functional network that over time can be seen as innovative cross-sectorial collaboration. The innovation network is bottom-up, since it is founded on an entrepreneurial initiative and still relies heavily on releasing local resources. Nevertheless, the network was from the outset conditioned by having an existing and recognised platform to develop from and still it is dependent on MYOB as ‘system integrator’ in realisation of the MYOB programme.