The need for social innovation and where it is contributing and aspires to resolve, has not gone away but it does seem to me, some of the energy and passion seems to have drained away in this time.

Perhaps, in recent weeks, there are some signs of some emerging initiatives that are beginning to be ‘rekindle’ this social innovation flame but it seems in such incremental ways. Surely what is needed, is making bold leaps at this time not token gestures? We need to mobilize with a real intensity around many of the present social ills we are facing.

Recent losses in the movement for social innovation

Firstly for those involved in the social innovation movement the sad loss of Diogo Vasconcelos, who tragically died last year took away the champion of social innovation.

Equally the move of Geoff  Mulgan from being the CEO of the Young Foundation into a broader CEO’s role at Nesta, where they certainly have shifted their recent focus in helping people and organizations bring great innovation ideas to life has altered where the emphasis needs to be placed for innovation in general, less so for social innovation.

This focus has been through providing investments and grants to mobilize research, explored through networks and building the skills necessary as the UK’s innovation foundation.
My feeling is that the focused energy, commitment and passion both of these individuals brought to social innovation has not been replaced as yet. It seems both organizations (Nesta and the Young Foundation) are actively exploring novel ways to support social innovation.

Yet in these tough economic circumstances, at the very time these really need accelerating at a pace, it must be very hard to deliver the level and depth of solutions society needs and is crying out for? What we do need is more champions to be visible to keep social innovation shining in the headlights for our leaders to see and support.

I’m certainly not so encouraged that a recent competition announced  greatly accelerates and meets today’s real, pressing social needs in the ways we should be doing. We need a lot more movement and commitment than this, when we are facing over 25 million people out of work across Europe and up to 50% of young people in Spain and Greece unemployed and large parts of Ireland, Italy, Portugal, France, the UK all struggling to hold the level of the young, unemployed below 30%.

The constant closure of businesses, the hardships of millions all caught up in the economic distress is causing us to face some of the most  serious economic hardships across most of Europe in our lifetime.

Perhaps we have had a void in this time? Has it got harder or easier in the past 12 months?

As I have sensed the energy has been seemingly lost in social innovation. Its past ‘raw’ passion has been replaced with a very different type of animal. There has been a major event in this time, in that the EU commission has taken social innovation into the heart of its future programmes. It wants to make the fixing of society’s most severe problems as central.

This, they are suggesting, needs to become a people-centred movement, which aims to create a more participatory practice-based process to find sustainable strategies for a socially and sustainable future. This planned adoption, this shift in the emphasis point of being more open and participatory, is actually a really daunting task to achieve.

The EU by taking hold of social innovation, might actually be squeezing out the very forces, the passion, the individuals commitments to social issues at a grass root level and replacing this with “people power” might be more volatile than they think.

The shift suggested is perhaps beyond bold but reckless, unless it has a clear model to replace the existing, as these existing models are breaking down under the strains being imposed by austerity cuts.

Is this EU adoption a possible distraction, deflecting vital resources and commitment from the issues needing to be resolved in the here and now and attracting the ‘organizing’ resources away at a vital time to work on alignment and policy forming issues.

Those that have actual experience to resolve social issues themselves get distracted away in aligning with the EU on its application of taking on social innovation. Can we afford that in these times? Unless we have emerging a Social Innovation equivalent of a Marshall plan as a Social European Recovery Program, SERP.

A real concern is that Brussels, the centre for EU policies and planning, has even less in common with the very real people that are actively engaged in the social solutions needed today. They march to a very different ‘beat’. Social innovation is by its very nature and attempt at tackling complex social problems experimental, cross-cutting, highly collaborative and very dispersed into pockets of local need and application.

It is going to be a struggle to fit social innovators with the Bureaucratic nature of the EU, less than risk-embracing, grappling with the severe economic problems across the EU community. So far the EU or national governments are not finding easy solutions to complex economic issues, can they add even more to their crowded agenda of social innovation.

There is just too many questions being asked of the existing success or failures around the EU as an economic and financial block ? Adding social innovation at this time when the EU is defensive and under increasing attack is questionable.

We are facing austere cuts across many European countries, social initiatives are being caught up within all these economic cuts demanded.

How can social innovation help solve the very issues when it is equally being starved of money, resources and focus?

There are countless acute needs for solutions
There is a growing need across the EU for support, both in material ways (creation of jobs) and psychological needs (to manage in these austere times). Is social innovation rising to these twin challenges to help resolve these urgent needs of today?

Deep within this ‘catch all’ of social innovation we need to prepare many for the most difficult transitions they are facing within their lives:  in loss of jobs, in their self-esteem, in their future and in their rights of choice, as these are being taken away from them in so many different ways. The destiny of many is being pre-determined by so many events out of their control and when people feel powerless, they ‘react’. Perhaps a very different type of “people power” than those in power would desire.

The ability to build ‘resilience’ is currently heavily shackled by a lack of money entering the system; the debt burden at individual, state and EU level is restricting options. Hard choices are casting more out of the participants of wealth creation, into being dependants upon others. Many are spiralling down.

In a world of networks and instant connections we are witnessing a growing sense of isolation, physical isolation. There are fewer people to turn too and ask for advice, for help, for recognizing their needs for support, because these people are becoming more hidden from plain view.

They are increasingly on the margins, caused by policy revision, austerity cuts and become increasingly small in scale as they can’t find the voice of the past, that would stand up for them.

Social innovation is complex and challenging but it needs to deliver solutions today.

There are many ways to sketch an increasingly complex picture of social ills. There is a vicious spiral, turning to greater tensions and increased pressure points. There are moments of transition and social innovation needs to respond and respond quickly to these pressures.

We are facing growing health issues, ageing challenges, youth disenfranchisement, and communities breaking down, a growing sense of injustice, and lowering of well-being.

The social innovation light needs turning on brightly, it can’t simply flicker like it is now. There is no future if we can’t find pathways and real solutions to the problems we are facing today.

Society needs to engage before it is “too little too late” and I fear we are far too close to the social equivalent of the doomsday clock of midnight.

The post The Flickering Light of Social Innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

The challenges of ‘social’ is everywhere; within organizations, in all sorts of collective movements, in politics, across government, society, markets, academic institutions and effecting our personal lives in a host of ways.
Society has to face up to some really tough challenges and only innovation can solve these with human beings inventiveness and ingenuity. Regretfully we have still an accelerating ‘creative destruction’ and we are often more Schumpeterian than ever.

Something has got to give and it will be within the broad social domain where it will all come together, many social things are converging or feeding off each other. Let’s take a brief look at all this social orientation going on.
Social engineering– we are seeing better motivation techniques to improve the work space, the communication tools and provide better access to knowledge. The increasing social role within the workspace is going to be essential for that sense of belonging and identification, when we are faced with diminishing workforces in the future

Social belonging needs– in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs social belonging is seen as important. We need to encourage more ‘touch downs’ and connections within our daily work, to provide an increased sense of belonging we need to encourage leaders to hold more impromptu meetings, encourage more spontaneous interactions and discussions to extract the knowledge within individuals, our organization  and in more open ways externally to the enterprise. We are all ‘gaining our personal voice’ in so many different ways we need to provide a more social environment.

Social unmet needs– we need to look more to overcome the multiple challenges of 1) increasing physical needs and reducing resources, 2) tackle the constraints on future skills and capabilities, 3) provide different ways to offer care and advice, and 4) solve the growing psychic pressures many seem to be having to solve their personal issues. There are many intractable problems out there in society that we have to come to grips with and offer new more innovative solutions.

Social economy– we are seeing the mechanisms of the social economy breaking down and the different institutions and organizations are going to be under even more severe pressure with cost cuts. Often the boundaries there were clear in the past are becoming blurred and we have to tackle these with more social innovations. There is an increasing need to redraw a growing complex set of relationships and establish the different, distinct approaches required by innovation to understand, leverage and extract more from these groups  involved for more social needs and aspirations of individuals within communities.

Social transformations are happening all around us. The very structures and institutions are under increasing strain and in some cases simply collapsing. There are new paradigms that we need to understand and translate, for instance the massive shift taking place from ‘push-through’ to ‘pull-through’ and the requirement of the individual not just serving the mass. There is intense ‘tensions’ for wider change and many organizations are failing to keep up or not being bold or radical enough to embrace and innovate in these changing times

Social innovation is growing in its discipline, its identity and understanding its tasks. Social innovation has to tackle the problems of increasing epidemics, flooding, pollution, healthcare costs, waste, inadequate welfare programmes and a widening inequality within society. We have to construct solutions around 1) structures and mechanisms to develop and diffuse quickly and effectively, 2) establish the process of social innovation to extend it beyond business or its philanthropy roots to extend it and spread it and in so doing bypass many restrictions and current barriers left in place from a rapidly older order of society and 3) productive systems to learn who can do what, when, where, how and with whom and scale it accordingly.

Social entrepreneurship– presently there are prescriptive theories on this as it is only emerging as a discipline in its own right in recent years and research tends to lag. What goes on today is social entrepreneurs blend methods from business and philanthropy to deliver what is needed in their challenge. This needs more understanding to allow for greater ‘replication’. The need of the social entrepreneur is to create social value but we need to define this a little more in the coming period.

Social value chains really do need to have an increased focus to understand in design, scale, the critical value-adding points, the ability or inability to scale understanding and in the service criteria. Some years ago the value chain become a focus of business with the result seeing a dramatic productivity improvement in results and we need the same amount of dedicated focus on the social value chain and what are good  and improved outcomes along it from these efforts.

Social enterprises. The need to organize and deliver in complex situations of crisis requires very different thinking and adaption than in the norm. Understanding how one social enterprise is successful and more importantly evaluating if its processes, structures and organisation can be scalable is a real skill. Too often good social endeavours successful in one place cannot be duplicated so easiliy in another. We need to understand the why more.

What are the conditions need that we can learn from, replicate and be extracted and what can’t be duplicated or scaled as recognized and left where they are. Understanding what and how to manage  social innovate differently for different situations will make a real difference so the learning ‘adapts’ more to the often unique conditions found and in the process we can reduce sometimes some expensive mistakes from just blindly copying and ignoring these variables. As social enterprises continue to learn, innovation will be more prevelant.

Social responsibility within our organizations. Taking our social resonsibility seriuously has become increasingly important in recent years to. We need to be more transparent, more willing to engage society and the different interested groups. Increased emphasis is being placed on higher standards of practice, environmental sustainability, growing compliance with national laws and relevant conventions and sustainability for the better of society. There is certainly a greater sense of sharing the value more equally with societies by many larger organizations and addressing the ‘possible’ higher costs of complying with this is leading to many, often, imaginative innovative approaches. Much more has to be done but social responsibility is on most agenda’s of business, government and institutions and part of the internal innovation process more and more within organizations.

Social media– this has been one of the hottest subject in recent years. How different social platforms are connecting people to the information they want to see and use. We all need clear social media strategies, organizations, governments, communities and individuals. Social media can become the real ‘glue’ for bringing together innovation as it ‘sticks the incompletes together’ into new forms and things. Blogging, twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and the host of other social tools bring us ‘content’ as never before. We need a plan to market this content and understand its value. This social aspect offers some exciting times ahead.

Social networking is something we are all being encouraged to do, to get involved in. Third party social networks are opening up to knowledge that was left ‘alone’ in the past. Engaging in social networks is offering us so many multiple choices of different ways to operate and respond. Social networking can increase awareness, improve traffic to and from your site, prompt trails, stimulate new service offerings, engage broader audiences than in the past, enable you to design, test, drive your business, can prompt repeats, referrals and improve retention. Social networks now drive innovation and provide a powerful notification tool of the work you are doing.

Social is critical to build into our everyday thinking. It can amplify everything, it can offer dynamic experiences, it can deliver faster than ever and we need to increasingly interact all the time. We are really getting very social in different, more interesting and innovative ways.

Our new social consciousness can embed and diffuse innovation, it can fuel a more cumulative dynamic effect and empower larger groups with more confidence to master innovation understanding.

One final point- authenticity will rule in our social environment otherwise you will be quickly outcast from your social group.

The post Social will dominate innovation thinking in 2011 and beyond. first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.