Meet Our Founder

Dr. Wamuyu Mahinda  believes in Collaborative Value which shedescribes as a vehicle through which teams can collaborate on specific challenges or exploit opportunities in ways that achieve greater impact than they could achieve alone.

For  teams to achieve collaborative value, they should: function and thrive in collaboration by focusing on the relationships and types of knowledge creation and absorption between different teams; unleash teams’ potential to solve problems and form alignment between how they work, deliver, and their continued development over time; downplay relational conflicts and instead emphasis on incorporating teams’ different opinions; go beyond necessary factual information to a point where team members transfer their unique understanding and willingly engage in sharing to build on each other’s interpretations and collectively make sense; embrace timely information sharing and last but not least embrace social capital as it positively affects the team members’ learning culture factors, which affects the team learning ethos, creates a safe space, and contributes to the free flow of information, giving rise to new ways to create value. Social capital also  encourages members to share experiences of positive feelings and emotional encouragement to enhance enthusiasm in work‐related issues.

Societies are encountering social, economic, and environmental challenges that have become increasingly complex to such an extent that no single sector (i.e., public, private, non-profit) has the capacity to tackle them individually

The outcome of Wamuyu’s doctoral research on The influence of team leadership on collaborative value conducted among over 100  social entrepreneurs (Ashoka Fellows) in 19 African countries showed that for collaboration to be successful teams must set goals collectively (have a shared vision), be open to learning, should adopt coaching for quality and functioning, practice timely information sharing, encourage objective negotiations, have methodologies to solve and learn from conflicts as well as embrace social capital. Wamuyu also learned that social entrepreneurs in Africa have homegrown solutions that can be scaled to achieve inclusive transformational change.

Wamuyu realized that to operationalize the research findings she needed to do two things: develop a Theory of Change and design a model (vehicle) to achieve the theory of change. This website has information on our Theory of change, and theCollective Enterprise Model – our vehicle for scaling homegrown solutions for systems change.