"Nearly every problem has been solved by someone, somewhere. The challenge of the 21st century is to find out what works and scale it up."
Bill ClintonDespite unprecedented levels of citizen, government, business and civil society efforts towards solving humanity’s greatest challenges, there remains an estimated $50 trillion funding gap for solving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.
While increasingly adopted as short hand for humanity's wicked problems, no single entity has either the capital or the capacity to solve any one, let alone all, of these issues.
We believe there simply has to be a better way.
Sphaera is a systems engineering firm developing open distributed, global, digital infrastructure to mobilise data, innovations and capital at trillion dollar scale to address the most urgent challenges of the modern age.
Our founders are social change, social finance and social technology veterans. Our partners and clients are forward thinking, world-positive leaders and organizations who believe as we do that collaboration is a fundamental requirement for success in the 21st century.
We engineer systems to tackle wicked problems.
With expertise in digital strategy, financial product design, and software engineering, Sphaera occupies a unique position in the realm of world-positive technology companies.
We conceptualise, design and develop legal, financial and technical infrastructure that supports connecting, collaborating and sharing resources across disparate organisations, networks and communities.
Our process is directly informed by successful startup and digital agency experience, with one notable exception.
Everything we create is purpose-built to meet the discrete needs of our clients and partners while simultaneously forming part of our platform as a service for the common good.
The Sphaera framework addresses the following primary requirements:
WHAT WE DO
Knowledge Mobilisation
Institutional and sectoral knowledge may be well managed and well organised, but that doesn't mean it's mobile. Mobilising knowledge -- including data and innovations - is the essential end point of traditional KM practises, and the core of the Sphaera platform.
Portfolio Leveraging
Achieving a return on investment - whether you measure that in social, financial, or environmental outcomes - is a critical requirement for any funder. Sphaera helps expand portfolio returns through global partnerships.
Relationship Brokering
Connecting across organisational silos is foundational for global collaboration to address wicked problems. Too often, networks and intermediaries become human switchboards. Sphaera helps to automate and optimise these connections.
HOW WE DO IT
The business of change is long on story and short on recipe.
Sphaera was founded upon a simple premise: that there is already an abundance of proven solutions to known problems that, if made available in a reusable format, could help to accelerate the pace of social change.
Narrative content in the form of stories and reports, and summary data - contextualised, analysed and interpreted -- fails to deliver tangible, actionable intelligence.
Curated reductionism - the process of breaking complex ideas into their more simple components - is at the heart of the Sphaera systems design framework.
This methodology has resulted in a way of communicating, sharing and storing information and data in ways that result in a much higher degree of reusability.
We call the resulting elements Building Blocks - discrete parts of a solution, independent of context, that permit practitioners to connect around common ideas across diverse countries, cultures and contexts.
Browse Solutions
WHO WE SERVE
We serve all citizens first.
Sphaera’s systems are designed to support the participation of all citizens, regardless of location, language, economic power, or available communications infrastructure.
While many speak of human-centred design, we practice citizen-centric design - because we consider that all citizens have an active and essential role to play within any systems that are designed to serve the common good.
Sphaera’s systems design aims to support all citizens by focusing, amplifying and accelerating the work of each of the three sectors of society:
Governments
Government plays an essential role in the resolution of wicked problems, whether through funding, state-supported development initiatives, or legislation. Sphaera works with governments and government funded agencies of all sizes to increase their effectiveness in serving the needs of their constituents.
Corporations
Corporations are increasingly focused on responsible sourcing, and incorporating CSR initiatives into their core business processes. Sphaera believes that businesses of all sizes are essential for scaling solutions to wicked problems, and supports their integration into multi-stakeholder initiatives.
Civil Society
The primary focus of most efforts to address humanity's wicked problems, civil society is an essential, component of any global system. Sphaera's technology delivers value across the entire spectrum of civil society organisations, including academia, charities, foundations, NGOs, professional associations and social enterprises.
WHO WE ARE
Core Team
Strategic Partners
Partners
LATEST THOUGHTS
Recent Publications
A concept paper that describes how a transformative approach to collaboration and finance supports citizens, governments, corporations, and civil society to share the burdens and the benefits of solving wicked problems.
Click through to the website to read the overview and download the paper.
The Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation commissioned a group of lawyers, financiers, metrics experts and systems designers to explore how to implement a Market Network in the Senegal River Basin.
Click through to the website to read the overview and download the paper.
After reading our article on Medium, the Bertelsmann Foundation commissioned Sphaera and Artha Networks to research and analyse the challenges and opportunities for platform operators in the impact finance sector.
Click through to the website to read the overview and download the paper.
Posts & Media
GET INVOLVED
Sphaera merged with Uncompromise in 2020 to form a new mutualistic entity called Armillaria - a systems lab for equitable economies.. To find out more about our vision and our work, please visit our new website here. Our team are distributed, and available to meet in-person or online across most timezones.