This is a CTP of initiative: RIPESS/ APRES‐GE (Switzerland)
This CTP covers the period between 2013 and 2015 when the Chamber had to face growing difficulties regarding its incubator called "Essaim". Even though the launch of the project is treated in another CTP, the interviewee reminded that it was the result of a cooperation with the city of Geneva. This incubator project was launched in 2008 in partnership with the city, firstly with the person in charge of social action at the city of Geneva and then with the service in charge of sustainable development. The decision to launch Essaim, after having been validated by the municipal council, was formalized in a Convention, which included objectives and indicators, as the interviewee explained: "some indicators were decided with the relevant department in the Geneva public administration. This project was also dependent on a vote by municipal representatives".
Moreover, these indicators, which reflected the essence and the aim of Essaim were jointly developed: "The indicators which were developed with the city of Geneva were aimed at making the objectives of the incubator social in the first place, and economic in a second step. For them, the incubator was thought to receive people with projects, so that we could test them during interviews in order to see if the project could move forward. Often, these were unemployed people who wanted to launch a project or change their career orientation: it means that there was a financial risk, since some of them would use their personal savings during the first months or even the first years of their project. Our role consisted in determining quickly enough if their project had a future and, if so, in supporting them during 3 years during the launch of their project". When the incubator was launched, its aim was essentially social for that matter.
At the internal level, the people involved in Essaim were the General Secretary, the board, the head and the staff of the incubator. "The board acted as the strategic steering body, while the General Secretary acted as a transmission belt between the strategy and the operational: it was a person who attended the board meetings and who was in charge of the implementation of what was decided during these meetings. The head of the incubator was responsible for the relations with the city, jointly with the General Secretary who attended external meetings with him. The staff managed the operational part". Regarding the timeline, it is worth mentioning that few internal changes happened in the same time: The first General Secretary, as well as the first person in charge of Essaim left in 2012. They both were replaced in 2013, which led to internal difficulties.
These internal difficulties, in conjunction with external difficulties which will be developed in another category, jointly led to the decision of transferring the funding of Essaim to another entity in December 2015. As a consequence, the incubator stopped its activities at the beginning of 2016.
This CTP was the result of two phenomena: the growing discrepancy between expectations from the outside and expectations from the inside of the incubator as well as the willingness to cut subsidies from the new right-wing majority in the municipal Council of Geneva.
First, Essaim deflected with traditional incubators, because of its strong social orientation:"I think it's the same in a lot of regions and in a lot of countries: public authorities are always very keen to create incubators which are linked to financial technologies or to other prestigious or sexy fields. Because Essaim was more about giving the opportunity to the people that wanted to start a business in a field that wasn't necessarily innovative, this may have created tensions or deceptions". Even though it was clear from the beginning that Essaim would represent a new kind of incubator, observers may have been expecting economic performance, especially regarding employment. As the interviewee explained, "There were struggles on the role which had this incubator in the Geneva microcosm [...]. Today, the subsidized incubators, in the Geneva region or city, are firstly aimed at creating employment. This indicator is the most important for external observers, and especially political representatives who were not necessarily aware of the social goal we were given". Moreover, the staff of the incubator was very attached to the social role of the incubator, and did not pay themselves much attention to its economic performance:"The staff was very oriented on the social role of the incubator, on its role regarding social guidance rather than economic guidance. This explains why we faced some difficulties when it came down to re-orientate the incubator".
On top of this issue, a new right-wing majority in the municipal council appeared in 2015 with a clear objective to reduce spending, especially on social issues: "The majority within the municipal Council had changed few months before, bringing a right-wing majority. There always has been willingness for right-wing political parties to cut the budget of associations [...] The incubator was caught in a storm, in a collective action aiming at cutting the subsidies offered to associations. When the financial line for the incubator was removed, it was in a context of across-the-board cuts which concerned all the associations. All associations were attacked. It was directly linked to the political context". Moreover, the change in majority in the Council does not explain alone the subsidies' cuts. A particular feature of this majority is that it was characterized by a high voting discipline, making the chance to swing the vote close to zero: "they had signed a kind of agreement according to which they would make a coalition and vote the same. Even though some right-wing representatives did support us, we could not beat this collective logic. Our right-wing supporters just abstained from voting, in a very shy attempt to make the vote swing without being too visible. But there was a group logic that couldn’t be overcome: they were completely aligned on every point and there was no room for discussion or manoeuvre". As a result, the amendments to the proposed budget resulted in deep cuts for the Geneva associations, and the transfer of the funding of Essaim to another entity, aimed at promoting economic development in general.
The amendments to the budget, which led to the loss of funding for Essaim, were followed by two-related events: the necessity for APRES-GE to let some employees go and re-organize and a call for referendum against those amendments (which was positive, but which did not restore the funding of Essaim).
As soon as the loss of funding was announced, the board of APRES-GE made the tough decision to dismiss a great part of Essaim employees: "I believe that we learnt that we would not have the money for 2016 on the 15th of December 2015. After that, we had to quickly terminate labour contracts with our employees and contracts with salaried-entrepreneurs (because we had "support contracts" with them). There was this double challenge. If we were a company, it would have been like closing one of our departments". However, given the surprise effect associated with the loss of funding, this process took few months:"The first 6 months were about dismantlement. We had to communicate, to end-up the contracts, to see how we would continue and transition". The dismantlement, in conjunction with the departure of the General Secretary, forced the Chamber to re-organize and to create 3 poles (economic development, insertion, network building) to disseminate the responsibilities.
Moreover, the vote of the Council was immediately followed by a call for a referendum formulated by left-wing political parties, civil society organizations and associations (in the cultural sphere in particular): "More than 10 000 signatures were obtained in order to organize a referendum on the budget amendments which had passed. Few months later, Geneva citizens were called to vote". 60% of the voters rejected these amendments, which was considered as a victory. However, Essaim of outside the scope of the referendum, since it was a transfer and not a cut. As the interviewee explained, "We won't get our subsidy back because the referendum was about budget cuts. In our case, it was a transfer [to a municipal entity in charge of business support] and not a cut. It was outside the scope of the referendum. It is a purely legal issue. During quite a long period, we thought that the incubator was included in the scope of the referendum from a legal point of view. We learnt a long time after that it wasn’t the case". As disappointing as it might have been for the Chamber, this legal subtlety resulted in the permanent closing of the incubator.
Before the amendments voting of December 2015, the incubator was already suffering from internal and external difficulties and criticism. And when they learnt the vote would concern them (2 weeks in advance), members of APRES-GE tried their best to reverse the trend even though it did not work out.
Recurring difficulties regarding the operational leadership of Essaim had existed since the beginning of the incubator. "There were two people in charge of the incubator [...]. The first one, who was here until 2012, was very into conceptual aspects and modelling tools and less into monitoring indicators. Besides, the indicators often changed, so we had great difficulty with the follow-up of the indicators that were originally decided". This difficulty to deal with indicators was a constant criticism made towards Essaim. Moreover, on a more general level, its incapacity to provide economic relevance (despite its main goal being social) was also criticized: "Of course we are the Chamber for enterprises caring about humankind and the environment but we wanted to go beyond that image of 'capitalism crutch' by showing that we were able to create relevant economic services which would be viable. And at the same time, we had an incubator which was not able to promote people's projects all the way". According to the interviewee, something could have been done about that.
Issues with the second person in charge of the incubator were more interpersonal in nature. As the interviewee explained, "The second one was not trusted by his employees. This lack of trust relied on doubts about the professional skills of this person and on the fact that he shared SSE values. He did not come from the SSE inner circles, so there was mistrust from the beginnings which never vanished. These barriers even strengthened over the months and over the years". Aware of these claims, the board would be blamed later-on for their inability to include and listen to these internal critics: "When we had to let some employees go, we were blamed by the remaining ones because, according to them, the board could have done much more to save the incubator. I think that the fact that we always trusted people that, in their eyes, were not competent to run the incubator did not help. To them, it probably led to the end of Essaim". Even though this observation is not necessarily shared by the interviewee, it shows the underlying tensions, which existed well-before the decision to transfer the budget line of Essaim.
Besides, when APRES-GE learnt about this potential transfer, they tried to raise voices against it: "We heard early December about the coalition inside the municipal majority and about their plan to lead financial cuts and transfer the funds of Essaim of another entity. [...] In response, we decided to launch a general call against budget cuts (including the transfer issue) in order to make the issue visible [...] The members of the board also called every people they knew in an attempt to change the majority of the vote during the plenary session. However, it did not work out and all the cuts the majority wanted were approved". Despite their attempts to mobilize their networks, members of APRES-GE had to acknowledge their defeat.
What is striking with this CTP is how much APRES-GE did not anticipate the funding cut: first, because they were negotiating with the administrative services the renewal of their Convention; and second, because no direct criticism was made by politicians before the day of the vote.
First, the administrative services of the city of Geneva seemed rather happy of the cooperation and wanted to start a new one the year after: "The administrative services have never explicitly criticized us; they did not trigger the critics. [...] The Convention was supposed to end on the 31st of December 2015 and they asked us if it was okay to do the joint evaluation during 2016. They wanted to use 2016 to make a complete evaluation of the project in order to launch another project that would reflect the strong and the weak points of the first incubator [...]. We had already scheduled a planning: we were supposed to give the joint assessment in February 2016 in order to apply for a renewal of the Convention in April". In this context, the Chamber's employees did not expect the Convention to end suddenly.
Moreover, despite a change of political majority few months before, the incubator had not been the subject of any political interpellation or questions: "What is striking is that before the vote of the Council [in December 2015], we were not aware of that. There were no direct critics or parliamentary interpellations towards the incubator. They are allowed to ask questions or formulate interpellations during plenary sessions of the municipal Council. There were no interpellations during the 5 or 6 years of the project". Apparently, they realized the social dimension of the project when they paid close attention to the budget, which means 2 weeks before the vote. As the interviewee recalls, "The city council representatives triggered the critics when they realized that the funds we were given were not used in the most efficient way for them, which means to create jobs and viable projects. Regarding this dimension, I think they were right. Consequently, they decided to allocate this amount of money to another organization which was more able to meet these objectives in their opinion".
Few lessons have been drawn from this CTP: the necessity to monitor the implementation of strategic decisions internally, to communicate more and better and to develop stronger links with political parties and other organizations
According to the interviewee, if the incubator had taken a clear economic turn at some point, some damage could have been prevented. This was part of the board strategy, which, unfortunately, was not implemented:"We had a steering committee meetings every 6 weeks which gathered the head of the incubator (sometimes some of his staff) and 3 members of the board (which acted as a board delegation to discuss the incubator's strategy rather than operational challenges). This kind of meetings did not ensure the strategic shift the board had called for. We did a lot of them. However, our recommendations were not followed. We had a trust relationship with the staff, so we thought that even if our strategy was not well-appreciated by a person, he/she had the choice to quit APRES-GE or to follow the instructions. We had the final responsibility when it came down to meet the objectives of the incubator. We gave the strategy to be followed, but it wasn’t followed". This gap between the strategy design and its implementation should be overcome in the future, by controlling the compliance with the board's decisions:"We realized afterwards that there was a growing reluctance to apply our strategy: this shows one of the limits of a steering committee. We should have led a stronger monitoring work. In the future, we should use other tools or act quicker".
Another lesson concerns communication issues. In the future, they should communicate more about their activities in order to justify public funding: "We should have better communicated on the incubator as well. I think we really missed the importance of its image and we should have strengthened or changed it. The political representatives did not have a clue on what the incubator was about. They just saw a financial line which was branded "social" and they decided to cut that line. We should have made some effort to make the activities and the objectives of Essaim more visible".
A third lesson would be to better develop links with politicians and other organizations. Regarding the development of interpersonal relations with politicians, the interviewee said that:"If we have a look at what we could have done better (we are always clever retrospectively), obviously we could have developed stronger relations with certain political representatives and more regular ones with others". Moreover, links should also be developed with other organizations:"Now, we have to develop projects with other organizations in order to share risks (concerning projects or specific events). I think we need to do more things hand-in-hand with other structures. The aim is also to carry-out projects with both private and public funding".
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