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.

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

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.

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