Social Innovation as the New Global Obsession – The Guardian

Yvonne Roberts from the Young Foundation in the UK, does a great job of documenting Social Innovation as the new global obsession, highlighting examples of social innovation across the world, including Inspire, a web-based organization in Australia designed by and for young people with mental health problems; as well as citing governments, namely the UK, Singapore, Denmark and China, who are currently making generous investments in social innovation.

I would also add Canada to that list, thanks in large part to the  J.W. McConnell Family Foundation, currently the main proponents of Social Innovation Generation. The main purpose of SiG, specifically SiG@Waterloo, is to generate new knowledge on social innovation, what ‘change’ is within society, how it happens, when it happens, why it happens and who is involved in the process. If case studies are documented that answer some of the questions posed above, trends from this information could prove useful to other people trying to achieve similar measures of change within their communities and societies.

What is clear from Yvonne’s article however, is that we are still learning more about social innovation, maybe this is where the ‘innovation’ part comes in:  where invention is the creation of an idea, innovation is its development, implementation and scaling up. The word development indicates an ongoing process that will include a lot of learning, doing, evaluating and changing the way we do things. In essence, I would agree with Yvonne’s statement and her definition of social innovation as finding new ways to satisfy unmet social needs and asking the very important question of:

How do we generate social change from the bottom up, releasing the capacity in people to find fresh solutions?

in reference to certain problems that are proving intractable such as climate change; an ageing population; long-term chronic diseases and economic inequality.

Posted via web from Renjie Butalid