#10 – The 5-Minute Innovator: Social Innovation
This is part of a series, "The 5-Minute Innovator", which describes concepts and theories in the field of innovation without jargon and in no more than 1200 words, which you can read in five minutes without being a speed-reader. May contain traces of snark.
What is it?
Quite often, the name of a form of innovation leaves you scratching your head. Like ‘radical innovation’, which would suggest there is ‘pedestrian innovation’, or ‘open innovation’ which suggests that there exists innovation that is fully closed off from the world. The same goes for social innovation, which for some reason doesn’t mean that there exists ‘anti-social innovation’ (although I could mention some, like speakerphone mode on mobiles). No, social innovation refers to forms of innovation where the usual markers and metrics of the market economy has to step back and accept an at best secondary role. These are cases where the true measure of innovation is an aim to meet social needs, improve quality of life, or solve wicked societal problems in ways that go beyond what markets or governments can do on their own. In other words, we’re talking about a new product, service, model, or approach that creates social value rather than just commercial profit. Think microcredit. Think community fridges. Think hackathons for refugee integration or apps that match surplus food with hungry families. Think basically anything where innovation aims to do good first, and create a profit only later, if at all. Sure, there are social innovations where everyone profits, but this is a secondary concern, with social uplift, emancipation, capacity-building and so on always more important than whether someone makes a buck…
The concept has deep roots, and many mutual aid societies, co-ops, and charitable projects from the 19th century onwards would seem to qualify retroactively. That said, it was in the 2000s that the concept started gaining traction as a proper academic and policy buzzword. The European Commission helped popularize it in policy circles, and institutions like Stanford’s Center for Social Innovation or the Young Foundation in the UK gave it institutional legs. From being a pipedream, social innovation became something you could get grants for. Possibly even tenure. Still, the institutionalization of the concept did help in legitimizing it, and the real power lie in how the concept refused to separate how something is done from why it’s done. This was a true challenge to innovation, because it dared say that it wasn't just about nifty ideas or getting traction; it was about whether the innovation actually mattered. Did it address an unmet need in a way that way sustainable? Did it invite participation? Did it go beyond the mere selling of more stuff? Social innovation overlaps with design thinking, nonprofit entrepreneurship, participatory governance, and occasionally radical politics, but refuses to fully commit to any of them – preferring instead to stay cheerfully cross-disciplinary and messily pragmatic.
So, at the heart of social innovation is the question of what innovation does, and who it does it for. Most innovation is about helping the priviledged have even better lives, directly (by creating ‘toys for the boys’) or indirectly (by empowering the capitalist system that makes the former both easy and the accepted norm). Social innovation is innovation for the rest of the world, regardless of whether they can pay a premium for it or not. That said, it’s also a term that has been stretched in every direction imaginable. Banks now run “social innovation labs” and consultancies use the term to rebrand their CSR departments. That doesn’t invalidate the concept, but it does mean a healthy dose of critical thinking is advised when someone tells you their venture capital fund is “all about social innovation”.
All things considered, the emergence of social innovation as a concept in the broader innovation discourse has been a good and necessary thing. It has reminded the field that the power of innovation isn't supposed to go only to the people who can pay for it, but instead be something that can be deployed in numerous fields, many of which may be poor, downtrodden, and thus in more dire need of innovation than the priviledged classes most innovation pundits belong to.
Why is it important?
Before the introduction of the term into the broader discourse, the social element of innovation was often either ignored, marginalized, or both. This led to the odd notion in the discourse that innovation could solve almost any problem, all the while many of the most central problems weren't discussed. at all. Social innovation opened up for solutions to problems that neither trusted the invisible hand of the market nor the belevolence and skills of government. This notion of a third way, one that drew on ideas from the market but kept a strong social core, was very attractive to a lot of people. For organizations, it signaled a shift from CSR as an afterthought to something like an integrated mission. For communities, it offered a way to reclaim agency and design solutions that fit their realities. And for some it became a way to feel morally superior and maybe get a TED Talk out of it. Social innovation contains multitudes, but even with some missteps, it has opened up space for thinking about justice, inclusion, sustainability, and more as drivers, not constraints. Cynics might argue that social innovation too often gets co-opted and used as a pawn in a greater political game – and they’re not wrong. But even when flawed or limited, it has helped shift the innovation discourse to things that matter more than yet another cool function on your smartphone.
What now?
We are living in strange times, and social innovation is as well. On one hand, social innovation is everywhere: From smart cities to citizen science, from mutual aid groups during the pandemic to open-source climate tools. On the other hand, funding is patchy, attention spans are short, and many grassroots efforts risk burnout or being turned into filler in a PowerPoint-deck. There’s also a new elephant in the room: AI. While AI can optimize, scale, and analyze like nobody’s business, it doesn’t inherently care about equity or empathy. So the challenge is ensuring these new tools support social aims rather than just algorithmic efficiency. Can ChatGPT help reimagine community education? Sure. Can it fix systemic inequality? Not unless we radically rethink power structures. This is of course also part of the social innovation agenda, and going forward, the field will likely focus more on systems innovation. Rather than just fixing symptoms, which has been a great part of social innovation up until now, the era to come might be about rewiring the deeper dynamics that create social problems. And this is a good thing! Social innovation was never supposed to be about shiny apps. It’s about redesigning how we live and exist together.
Where can I learn more?
A quick way to start is with Geoff Mulgan et al.’s Social Innovation: What It Is, Why It Matters and How It Can Be Accelerated(2007). The Stanford Social Innovation Review is a nicely broad and inclusive ongoing publication, and Murray, Caulier-Grice, and Mulgan’s report The Open Book of Social Innovation (2010) is free, well-regarded, and comprehensive. A somewhat newer review of the research in the field can be found in do Adro & Fernandes (2020), Social innovation: a systematic literature review and future agenda research.