Tim Draimin, Executive Director of Social Innovation Generation (SiG) - Chair, Causeway Social Finance
Recently in Ottawa I joined over 30 people at a very informative international roundtable on social innovation hosted by the Policy Research Initiative (PRI - a small federal think tank) and the Public Policy Forum (PPF – a SiG partner with whom we organized the November 10th Accelerating Social Innovation conference in Toronto).
The Ottawa event is another telling indication of how quickly the ferment of ideas about social innovation is spreading and being taken seriously by policy makers.
For the Canadian participants, the real bonus was participation by practitioners from international organizations such as:
- MindLab, a Danish public sector organization, working across the public sector and involving citizens and businesses in creating better public solutions
- The Australian Centre for Social Innovation, a centre of excellence in social innovation.
- The Young Foundation, which brings together insight, innovation and entrepreneurship to meet social needs, and SIX, the Social Innovation Exchange hosted at the Young Foundation, a global community of over 700 individuals and organisations – including small NGOs and global firms, public agencies and academics - committed to promoting social innovation and growing the capacity of the field.
- Root Cause, a research and consulting firm dedicated to mobilizing the non-profit, public, and business sectors to work together in a new social impact market.
- European Commission’s Directorate-General for Research, looking at social innovation as an integral part of planning the European Community’s future.
Dominant impressions from the fast moving daylong session include:
- Rapid Dissemination – How quickly governments around the world are embracing the value of social innovation and employing diverse ways for the public service to benefit from its generation and application
- Support Systems Vital – A corollary of that is the practical need for dedicated social innovation support structures (platforms for experimentation, knowledge sharing and capacity building systems, policy frameworks, etc.) to enable government excellence in implementing social innovation
- Transformational Drivers – Urgent recognition in some quarters that SI is being driven by a transformational imperative created by formidable pressures as current systems hit structural barriers (demographic pressures, fiscal constraints, etc.), and
- Opportunity Landscape – The growing pockets of policy opportunity in Canada (federally, provincially).
A range of new and newish ideas ran across participant commentaries (the meeting operated by Chatham House Rules so speakers cannot be identified). These ideas included:
- Innovation Ecosystem: for social innovations to succeed they need an enabling ecosystem composed of a variety of components ranging from public policy, to support structures, to knowledge, to the “how to” social technology of innovation processes and roles (as different from new media “social tech”)
- Co-creation: the idea that innovative solutions are generated when all sectors and system users are engaged in the process, i.e. “new solutions are found with people not for people”
- Co-production: the recognition that new models of social service delivery will be a complex interplay of providers including traditional agencies, non-profits, individuals (as volunteers and/or family members)
- Democracy by-product: the proposition that successful social innovations, particularly involving public services, might also (but not necessarily) enhance democratic engagement
- Public value management: social innovation is a lens highlighting public value; social innovation can support the creation of infrastructure and mechanisms that are needed to produce that new public value.
- Missing middle: social innovation requires support systems and connector roles, which are the indispensable roles of intermediaries, facilitated spaces, and “living labs”
- Innovation hubs: Part of the missing middle is how innovation hubs, whether of a commercialization or non-profit co-location genesis, can be effective platforms for cross-sector social innovation generation
- De-risking: finding ways and places to organize social innovation activity, sometimes through the role of specialized platforms, that reduce dumb errors and narrow mistakes to smart errors; a recurrent sub-theme was governments’ lack of tolerance for risk due to accountability imperatives
- Governments evolving from deliverers to commissioners of social services: with services being undertaken in new “co-production” formats
- Opportunities environment: social innovation, operating in the field of complexity, does not have easily replicable “recipes”, rather it has to take advantage of opportunities; it has to apprehend landscape opportunities and know how to proactively shape them; government can help by creating the conditions making it more favourable for innovation to take root
- Spread versus Replication: Achieving impact is too slow if the model is left to replication; spreading social innovations are more possible through systems changes achieved through government and public policy
- Social Impact Bonds: A new way to tackle social problems where a consortium of primarily non-governmental actors takes on a deeply rooted problem on spec and is reimbursed by government (only on the basis of results achieved), allowing governments to share the savings generated to the public purse. An SIB helps shift focus to root causes as well as aligning incentives with outcomes while reducing risk to government. On the day of the conference, the first SIB was formally announced in the UK.
- Households as incubators: Besides the roles of the formal sectors (government, business, non-profits, academia) in the social innovation process, a major source of social innovation come from the family household; families have a role in co-creation and are increasingly recognized as co-producers.
Why should governments value social innovation?
It was suggested that there are four ways it generates improvements:
- Productivity
- Service experience for citizens
- Social or other outcomes, and
- Democracy (the potential fourth bottom line).
Who knows best how citizens and end users experience what government does?
Is it academic researchers? Consumers? Does government have the “professional empathy” to successfully understand how they experience government services. One example was given of an injured workers commission; there the workers' spouses held the greatest knowledge.
Traditional evaluations were characterized as arriving too late to have impact. The process of social innovation was described as messy, iterative and more driven by qualitative insights than quantitative measurement.
The metrics needed should be less a product of outside compliance demands and more a tool to continuously hone the model being developed to make it better.
The social innovation process, being open, does lend itself to “sharing power” and taking advantage of social networking.
Social innovation is enabled where intersections are created linking public, private, non-profit actors and creating convening opportunities.
How to “mind the gap” between the proliferation of micro social innovations and their scaled impact?
While a great deal of social innovation is happening across Canada, the challenge has been taking local social innovations successfully to scale. Deliberate and intentional strategies are called for.
Some referred to the need to create a new supportive culture characterized by creating co-creation tables of enlightened self-interest, trust, and belief in the possible.
Social innovations need new business models. (This topic did not have the focus it deserves.)
While the social innovation process was challenging and key to success, social innovation itself is only a means to end.
For MindLab, social innovation required things like consciousness, communities of practice, capacity, courage, and co-creation. Social innovation takes up the challenge of wicked problems, not usually eliminating them but making the problem smaller, reducing its impact.
It was suggested that social innovation has a seven-stage process:
- Understanding and challenging the problem, with everyone involved this might require re-framing the problem
- Knowledge creation, undertaking the research to know the field and the problem deeply recognizing that the learning process itself is an iterative one
- Analysis, structuring what is known to identify and see the patterns
- Synthesis, bringing everything together from the bottom up but employing intuition and gut feeling
- Creation and ideation, a process requiring very diverse points of view and experiences from artists to businesspeople to civil society and non-profits to government; assembling collective knowledge; in turn this leads to prototyping and testing things like products and services
- Scaling, undertaking the implementation
- Learning, undertaking the performance measurement and management
How well positioned is Canada, especially the non-profit sector, when it comes to social innovation?
One acute observer of the Canadian landscape noted that there are various challenges in moving into the social innovation space:
- There is little cross-sectoral exchange so little ability to benefit from difference experiences working in other sectors
- The strong contract culture has created a “box of accountability”
- The non-profit sector lacks the finance tools and the hybrid forms needed to thrive
- The lack of non-profit support infrastructure means the sector is less adept at spreading ideas and innovations
- The significant demographic issue is a barrier to routes into innovation. The OECD predicts the proportion of retired Canadians could almost double from 20% to nearly 40% in the next quarter century if trend lines don’t change. That translates into fewer taxpayers and more people drawing on services. It could also create difficulty for young, new entrants into the non-profit sector.
What are we learning from existing social innovation organizations?
One participant had recently been involved in a scan of European social innovation agencies and initiatives. The identified learnings included:
- Successful social innovation initiatives required some form of structure; it could be an overarching structure or simply be cast as a virtual structure cast around an initiative
- It is necessary to have clarity on the priority for action and the priority tools for action
- There need to be milestones and targets for achievements, supported by roles for reporting and auditing
- Innovation task forces can be a useful vehicle inside government, especially when spread across director generals and even across Europe; the goal is to lead to coordinated action that amalgamates and connects the bits and pieces
- Innovation structures need to be able to support fluid processes that engage people from inside and outside the organization; and that can explore short-term projects that cross boundaries.
How can social innovation be advanced?
- Developing new enabling social innovation policy
- Creating dedicated infrastructure, new offices, idea banks, either located inside government or done on a cross-sectoral basis (an example of the latter is the Innovation Centre Copenhagen)
- Intentional encouragement by holding up models, convening key parties to stimulate collaborative initiatives, creating awards
- Rewarding exceptional performance, with reliable funding
- Funding initiatives, one ministry of finance is dedicating a large amount of capital to create a specialized market for innovative technology supporting an aging demographic
- Spreading successful approaches
- Creating knowledge, one suggestion is creating three-year fellowships for PhDs undertaking embedded research in practice
What are emerging structural models of promotion and dissemination of social Innovation?
In the United States special liaison offices have been created (usually by elected officials) that become the catalyst for the growth of social innovation. Examples were cited of Louisiana’s Lt. Governor’s office of social entrepreneurship and the mayor of Boston’s office of new urban mechanisms. In another case, a governor spun an internal office into a freestanding Foundation for Social Impact. Its social innovation program covered research on best practices, capacity building, and volunteerism initiatives.
The two liaison models cited were described as having either a foundation focus or state agency focus. The foundation model connects with the foundation world and leverages that private capital. The state agency model exercises influence by connecting siloed agencies inside and also by connecting them with outside non-profits.
How do we translate growing political interest into political will?
The observation was made that political interest is clearly increasing on social innovation. The challenge is to translate that into political will. As a transition strategy, one government has created a committee on social innovation with a multi-month mandate to report back. The process contributes to educating people inside and outside government.
Tellingly, dramatic factoids about government spending patterns are expanding interest in social innovation. One such fact is that in one jurisdiction 90% of new spending goes to healthcare. Looked at from another vantage point, healthcare already experiences 70% of costs being swallowed up by chronic diseases. How could social innovation help manage that cost load?
Where does business fit in?
There was universal agreement that social innovation required participation from all sectors. Unfortunately one sector was missing at the table: the business sector. Participants did speak about business initiatives where social innovation was prominent, including – but beyond – corporate social responsibility (CSR). In fact, it was argued that social innovation offered the private sector massive business opportunities. Models ranged from Danone’s partnership with Grameen Bank to build a yogurt industry in Bangladesh (improving diets while enhancing incomes of the rural poor) to Philips initiative on mobile health screening for rural areas using cell phone technology.
One specific initiative highlighted was a European innovation centre that convenes businesses to collaboratively work on solving complex social problems. One barrier that arises in these instances is creating ways to manage intellectual property rights.
