What do these ideas and organisations have in common:
- The Open University in the UK
- The Big Issue organisation that helps homeless people to make money by selling magazines
- Using the Internet to connect volunteers and new sources of funding to help a village in Africa install and maintain a pump for clean drinking water and another village in Sri Lanka to set up a new bee and honey-making business
- The Grameen Bank, a pioneer of microcredit for poor, rural people
At one level, the only thing that unites them is their willingness to confront profound and apparently intractable disadvantage with an idea that couldn’t possibly work. They share some important attributes:
- They invent a capability to confront and overcome complex social problems that didn’t exist before
- They betray a knack for connection and collaboration, snapping together the pieces in a social change value chain that links people, communities, money and institutional capacity
- They start from the premise that change has to be sustainable, create new economic opportunity and, in the process, give people a chance to connect to mainstream economic activity
- And they tend to break the mould of what is possible.
Welcome to the wonderful world of social innovation.
Australia needs to devote as much attention to developing a social innovation system over the next 20 years as it has in the past to the more familiar innovation systems for science and industry. At the same time, the innovation system in Australia has to become more collaborative, more open and inclusive and more responsive to the ideas, experience and insights of citizens and consumers.
Social innovation is the search for new solutions to pressing social needs, problems and opportunities that are often created by individuals or organisations with a social, and not a commercial, imperative and are based on expertise and resources that draw from, and appear at the intersection of, the community, business and government sectors. The solutions often, but not always, involve new ways to use smart technologies, especially the new opportunities created by social networking tools like Facebook, blogs and Twitter.
The impulse is always to try something different, provide an effective solution and in the process leave behind new and sustainable capabilities, assets or opportunities for social change.
Social innovation is becoming a more important part of the response to the big dilemmas we face. Global warming, sustainable cities, lifting people out of poverty, improving education and health systems, new models of social care for ageing populations – these are just a few of the large and complex social challenges which we need to deal with. Finding effective solutions will make a big difference to the quality of our lives and to our capacity to achieve sustainable prosperity. Innovation is at the heart of these challenges.
We are learning more about what good practice social innovation looks like and about the mix of institutional, financial, policy and organisational resources and capabilities needed to do it well. But we are still a long way behind in our search for robust and replicable models and methods that will dramatically lift our social innovation capability.
In particular, we need to increase the investment from government, the private sector and from civil society in the search for new models of social innovation that will increase its speed, scale and sustainability. The basic propositions are simple:
- Social innovation should be at the heart of Australia’s national innovation system
- It will increasingly be the key to finding solutions to many of the big social, economic and environmental challenges we face
- Investing in a more systematic and robust social innovation model is a logical next step for governments in Australia, many of whom are already committed to initiatives that make better use of our collective intelligence to think of new ways to address today’s pressing issues and those emerging in the future
- Government needs to use the new infrastructure of social innovation to explore ideas, understand current and next practice around the world and experiment with new policy models
- Social innovation investment, whether public, private or community, should extend our tolerance of risk and experimentation as new ideas are road-tested and refined
The fact is that, in Australia as in many countries around the world, we know how to innovate in science and we have an idea about how to do industrial R&D. But when it comes to thinking up new ways to reduce indigenous poverty or find clever ways to help people live independently as they grow older, it’s all a bit hit and miss. In the future, we’re going to have get better at social innovation…much better.
Now seems like a very good time to start.
About the Author
Martin Stewart-Weeks is Chairman, Australian Social Innovation Exchange (ASIX) (www.asix.org.au)
Australian Social Innovation Exchange is a “network of networks” that links people and organisations interested in, and actively engaged with, social innovation in Australia.
Its primary purpose is to lift the profile of social innovation as an idea and as a contributor to new thinking about the way we deal with complex and unmet social needs and to accelerate the innovation process that turns smart new thinking into viable solutions. It forms part of the proliferating global network of social innovators that is being connected by the Social Innovation Exchange (SIX), led by The Young Foundation in London.
Gradually building a network of thinkers, innovators and practitioners from different sectors, ASIX is holding Australia’s first Social Innovation Camp in March 2010. The camp will be a weekend of passion and commitment, clever thinking and a bit of technology to work on new ways to make a difference on the social issues, big and small, that we face as a community and as a country.
Copyright 2009, Martin Stewart-Weeks. All rights reserved. All material in this article is the Intellectual Property of Martin Stewart-Weeks and cannot be reproduced, copied, published, quoted or disseminated without the prior permission of Martin Stewart-Weeks.
Tags: innovation, social ventures