Defending social innovation

Posted by Erin Green on 22 June 2010 | 1 Comments
Tags: social innovation, community development

Recently I found myself in the strange position of defending social innovation to a committed community development worker. It was a strange position because I come from a community development background and his position was much the same as the one I held myself before I started this job only 6 months ago.

Good community development is often all about social innovation. We look at a situation, we sit down with community members to hear their stories and ideas, we are flexible, responsive and work with and for communities instead of doing 'to' them. Together we look for sustainable ideas, enterprising and innovative approaches and we prototype and test and prototype and test to get a project or system that fits. Good community development is about depth, about people, about sustainability. Of course, not all community development is good but when it is good it is great, creating sustainable positive change in people's lives.

When I first heard people talking about 'social innovation' I was a cynic. Wasn't this exactly what we, in the community sector, had been doing for years? 'Social innovation' sounded like an attempt to repackage this work and make it the latest trend for policy-makers. My critic just the other day echoed my earlier opinion, wasn't all this buzz around social innovation just a fad that ignored the good work already being done by the community sector?

To be honest, my answer, even now, is yes and no. There is a buzz around social innovation and, as with any 'new' wave there are lots of people interested in catching a ride. So yes, sometimes they cry wolf (or in this case 'look at my social innovation') and there's not much depth there. But good work is being done and it's not all in the community development sector.

Social innovation in community development is a huge part of what I'll call, for want of a better word, 'real' social innovation. The work with and for communities in the community development sector has developed some amazing answers to social needs because that's what social innovation is for - social impact and better lives for real people. But for me the umbrella of social innovation has to be about more than just community development. It has to include the work being done in the public sector and in legislation, not to mention the hundreds of social entrepreneurs who often don't even identify themselves with this space at all.

One of my critic's key points was that social innovation practices (and his definition of social innovation as community development) needs to stay underground to prevent governments from quashing good ideas before they even get off the ground. And I agree, often this is the case. Government funding and reporting structures can have exactly this affect (and people working in government are frequently the first to agree). But this is exactly why social innovation needs to be about more than the projects being done by organisations in the community development sector - some of the greatest social innovations in Australian history have needed governments and, particularly, legislation in order to have a profound impact on our lives (I'm thinking here of everything from women's suffrage, lesbian & gay rights to plastic bag bans and solar power rebates).

Why social innovation is necessary (and necessarily a broader church than just community development) is to help create those enabling environments that make governments and communities codesigners of solutions, where social entrepreneurs can operate in a supportive taxation environment (for example) and where all those great lessons learned from the community development sector can keep us from recreating the wheel and instead guide all of us interested in the social good (but not working directly in a community development organisation) in what works and what hasn't.

So I guess I'm thankful to that critic, he gave me a lot to think about, about what is working and what isn't in social innovation. And it is a mix of both.

I know there's a long, bumpy road ahead and social innovation will have its failures and some superficial wins but, at base, what we're looking for is nothing less than a new order, a different eco-system for approaching and creating social change. Because social innovation isn't just something it is nice to have. It's an urgent and necessary response to the complex web of wicked problems we're facing right now.