Social Innovation

Title: Societal entrepreneurship programme

Case Study by Eva Moe/ Erika Augustinsson

The Knowledge Foundation sees societal entrepreneurship as a
key to the future. Sweden needs technological development – but
we also need new ideas for our housing estates, new ways of
producing and consuming that respect the environment and new
ways of providing public services and care: in short, we need social
innovations.

Many of our social solutions were built for the structure of the
industrial society, when borders were more important – borders
between nations, between the market and the public sector and
between work and leisure. The difficult issues that we face today –
such as the climate threat, migration and segregation, globalization
and unequal distribution – cut across borders. And they are too
complex to be solved by players acting on their own.

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Title: Social Innovation: what it is, why it matters and how it can be accelerated

Article by Geoff Mulgan et al

20 February 2008, Social Innovation

This report examines how social innovation happens in NGOs, the public sector, movements, networks and markets. Following on from ‘Social Silicon Valleys: a manifesto for social innovation’, ‘Social Innovation’ presents a deeper, extended analysis of the history, the theory and the process, paving a way for social innovation to play an increasingly significant role in society.

Social innovations – new ideas that work to meet pressing unmet needs - are all around us. Examples include distance learning, patient-led healthcare, fair trade, Wikipedia and restorative justice. Many social innovations (from the Open University to laws against age discrimination) were successfully promoted by the Young Foundation in its previous incarnations.

Huge energies - and resources - are devoted to innovation in science and technology. But far less attention has been paid to social innovation, despite pressing needs in fields as diverse as chronic disease and climate change.

This report examines the growing importance of social innovation and how we can improve societies’ capacities to solve their problems.

It looks at the history of great social innovators – from Robert Owen to Wangari Maathai - and at what can be learned from research in related fields, including science and technology, design, social enterprise and public policy.

It makes the case for much more systematic initiatives to tap the ubiquitous intelligence that exists in every society and shows the practical ways in which successful social innovation can be accelerated.

This third edition represents a work in progress and we are grateful to the team at Saïd Business School in Oxford for earlier inputs and for enabling us to share it with the participants in their world forum on social entrepreneurship.

Please click here to download a copy of the report.

 

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Username: jembendell

Firstname: Jem
Surname: Bendell
City: Geneva
Country: Switzerland
Age: 37
Organisation: Lifeworth Consulting
Sector: Academia
Field of Interest: Social Innovation

Description: Here is a bio..... Associate Professor Jem Bendell is an advisor, educator, researcher and writer with fifteen years at the forefront of innovations in business responses to sustainable development. With a PhD in international policy, over 100 publications (including four books and four United Nations reports), Dr Bendell is an award-winning international authority on business-society relations, lecturing in fifteen countries, and quoted in media such as The Financial Times, International Herald Tribune, El Pais, Tatler and on CNBC. Since graduating from the University of Cambridge, Bendell has sought collaboration with people who seek to contribute to, and benefit from, the transformation of markets to promote global well-being. Director of Lifeworth Consulting, coordinating a team of sixteen associates, Dr Bendell works with UN agencies, international charities, universities and business, in over a dozen countries, having lived and worked in eight. He has helped create innovative initiatives, including: the Marine Stewardship Council, to endorse sustainable fisheries, The Financial Innovation Lab, to promote sustainable finance, founded and runs CSR Geneva, a network of over 700 professionals in Geneva, and the Authentic Luxury Network, for professionals promoting responsible luxury goods and services. As an academic, Dr Bendell has lectured at business and design schools around the world, worked with the Dean of a business school in Australia to make it a leading sustainability school in the Asia Pacific, and been an academic convenor for three international conferences on this subject (in the UK, Switzerland and Australia). His personal blog attracts over 20000 individual visitors and his company's portal of jobs and events in corporate responsibility averages 8000 visitors each month. Bendell's current focus is the potential of luxury brands, international finance, management education and inter-organisational collaboration, to promote a movement towards global well-being. His “Deeper Luxury” report on the responsibility of luxury brands, appeared in over 50 newspapers and magazines worldwide in the month of its release and continues to appear in fashion and business press today. Bendell's fourth book, The Corporate Responsibility Movement, was published in 2009. His next book Higher Ends: Sustainable Luxury Management and Design, is published in February 2011.

Title: Server: Plan for a self- sufficient motorway

Article by Alastair Parvin

Our generation faces a massive challenge - and opportunity - to fundamentally redesign our industrial-age system of mining food - towards a resilient, sustainable mode of farming food - all without losing our capacity to produce and distribute food on a massive scale. The author of this article argues that we need to embark of a series of large scale agricultural and infrastructural experiments in how we feed cities.

Server is one such proposed experiment - based on an almost absurdly simple proposition: could a motorway be self-sufficient? That is, could we unhook it from oil, and tie it into the surrounding agricultural economy, a belt of farmland whose major crop is .. mobility.

The project takes a 7-mile section of the M1 motorway in the midlands, and investigates its redesign as a self-sufficient farming belt, producing no overall waste and consuming no major external resources.Based on existing processes, prices and capacities, it attempts to choreograph a sort of agricultural ecosystem, in which the waste of one process is seen as the feedstock for the next.

You can read more about the Server project here: http://www.bemakeshift.com/catalogue/38/server.html

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Username: AllenX

Firstname: Allen
Surname: Xy
City: Beverly Hills
Organisation:
Sector: Other
Field of Interest: Social Innovation

Description:
 

Username: ruimartins

Firstname: Rui
Surname: Martins
City: Lisbon
Country: Portugal
Age: 39
Organisation: Dianova Portugal
Sector: NGO

Description: Corporate Communications and Public Affairs Director at Dianova, regional Coordinator for Portugal at European Association of Communication Directors at Dianova, Coordination Committee and National Representative at Forum Communication On Top Davos, Assistance Professor on Social Marketing and Social media Marketing at Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Communication Group Coordinator at Portuguese Corporate Social Responsibility Network, Member of Euclid Network Third Sector Leaders. Fields of expertise: Change Management, Reputation Management, Corporate Communications, Social Media Marketing, Healthcare Communications, Crisis Management, CSR Communications, Public Affairs, Media Relations

Title: Leading Social Innovation

Article by Gigi Georges and Stephen Goldsmith

Even as the social entrepreneurship movement makes strides forward, the ultimate success of any single innovation faces the stark reality that no real market exists for promoting the growth of these innovations—which instead depend for scale more on a political economy than a market one.

Government shapes disruptive innovation as it dominates funding in most areas of social policy. Given the inherently political nature of public expenditures and a culture that rewards compliance while often ignoring the voices of clients, programs and policies that offer no evidence of success still remain funded year after year. Incumbent providers, confident of their intentions, naturally seek to protect their stake, while government bureaucracies protect these webs of invested interests in a variety of ways that keep innovative problem-solvers from breaking through and supplying better alternatives. Moreover, government sees its role as offering dependable responses that avoid risk. This view creates a culture that represses change and decreases the public’s acceptance of any innovation that might end up with less than perfect results.

How can an elected or appointed public official act as a civic entrepreneur in a way that unlocks transformative public value? The article highlights a case study from New York City, where Mayor Michael Bloomberg and School Chancellor Joel Klein generated space for reform in two bold ways—the creation of an innovation fund and the “open sourcing” of innovation, inviting social entrepreneurs to play an important role inside government structures.

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Username: batotoyetu

Firstname: Batoto
Surname: Yetu
City: Lisbon
Country: Portugal
Organisation: Batoto Yetu Portugal
Sector: NGO

Description:

Title: The Future of the City

Article by Samule Palmisano

Samule Palmisano, the chair and chief executive of IBM, writes about the change agents of the 21st century and how the most important locus for innovation will be in the cities. Technology that can make our cities much smarter is already excisting. However, if we are really going to drive meaningful change, we need to get smarter about how we work together and the cities of the future will have to be far more collaborative than they currently are.

You can read the article here: http://www.newsweek.com/2010/01/15/the-future-of-the-city.print.html

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