I gaze through unbelieving eyes at the continued rise of unemployed in Europe. Unemployment in the Eurozone has reached another record high with the seasonally-adjusted rate for April  2013 going to 12.2%, up from 12.1% the month before according to the European Commission’s statistics office, Eurostat:An extra 95,000 people were out of work in the 17 countries that use the Euro, taking the total to 19.38 million. Both Greece and Spain have jobless rates above 25%. The lowest unemployment rate is in Austria at 4.9%.

It seems never-ending.

Youth unemployment remains a particular concern; you simply have to wonder what we are storing up in the longer term with this situation. Can the youth ever catch up, can our society as it is positioned give them the opportunities to turn today’s grim world into a world of optimism and contentment, or is it a lost generation?  In April, 3.6 million people under the age of 25 were out of work in the Eurozone, which translated to an unemployment rate of 24.4%.

Why does this issue of growing unemployment seem to be drowned out by events that seem important on the day but realistically pale in their significance against something as damaging as this present crisis?

Examples of persistent economic and social challenges

We are facing significant society challenges. These include declining Economic competitiveness, deepening Social inequalities, rising Mental ill-health, increasing Crime and social disorder and we see growing Alcohol and drug abuse, to name some of the issues being increasingly tackled as part of the consequences of these tough economic and social times.

We must increasingly recognise that the cost of deferring concerted action to confront these growing set of social challenges is beginning to rise – and could easily outpace our ability to respond.

Can we afford to wait? There are so many pressing questions.

The cost of lock in

More fundamentally, our existing approaches and institutions are also inadequate because, in the main, they lack the capacity to develop the new approaches we need through innovation.

We are faced increasingly with the ‘innovator’s dilemma’, identified by Professor Clayton Christensen, where a company or in this case whole nations can’t seem to address the changes (rapidly) going on around them.

Their existing models become obstacles in the face of changing conditions, deepening issues, new threats from emerging nations, rapidly changing technologies and a growing inability to overcome rapidly changing circumstances wrought by deteriorating economics, (infra) structures and upheavals.

Any organisation or system or even nation is susceptible to ‘lock-in’, whereby it loses the ability to develop novel ways to serve its customers or clients or markets because it has invested so heavily in its existing processes and technologies. This is part of one of the fiercest debates on the future of the European Union we have yet to have.

Our understanding of innovation has broadened

Today innovation is increasingly being understood in a broader perspective than just products alone. We are in a period of major transformation in what we mean by ‘innovation’. We need to push innovation across its broader understanding to explore new business models, unique services, greater collaborative techniques and community engagement.

Traditional innovation is insufficient for the challenges we face, this will not resolve climate change, an ageing society or reinvent public/ private services that match demand and need. We need greater connections across society.

There is a growing buzz around the Quadruple Helix of Innovation, where Government, Institutions (Academia, Foundations and NGO’s),  Industry and Citizens need to collaborate together to drive structural changes far beyond the scope of one organizations and what it can achieve on its own.

These will be increasingly through innovation engagement platforms where people use the designed structures to purposefully intensify exchanges to co-create value to solve our growing bigger problems.

Seeking out unconventional solutions through more radical innovation

These are times when we need some visionary leadership and thinkers out there. Those that dare to breach present accepted boundaries of rigid beliefs and conventions. Those that push beyond the normal practices and can depart from the commonly held goals of establishment, by looking for non-conventional novel solutions that can draw in more of the disenfranchised, we are seeing today.

Facing New Challenges: Promoting active inclusion through social innovation

Social inclusion is a pre-requisite for the creation of a just and cohesive society in which each individual can fully participate and realise his or her potential. Active inclusion, as one strand of the broader social inclusion concept is looking to draw in and deal with inclusion into society of people furthest away from the labour market.

We need to make new markets full of engaged young people.

 There is clearly a latent demand building in our societies and we need to turn this into a more ‘effective’ demand, to forge the links between supply and demand that will generate new value and opportunity. For example, who can invest in effective supply by supporting promising projects and collecting evidence of what works that shows promise of broader societal impact?

Then who can we involve who can invest in effectively ramping this up. Perhaps focusing the different Foundations already set up can turn this latent demand into effective demand. This might mean shifting resources from other parts of the world, back into Europe to get the economic engine kick started again.

Applying innovation intensity to what we do.

We need to rapidly accelerate a rigorous experimentation mentality by focusing far more on major societal challenges that need addressing, before it is too late. Ones that can encourage and embraces local solutions needed and engagement within communities but the learning can be rapidly absorbed and the winning concepts can be scaled up to benefit more communities or areas of need and resolution.

Different type of economic statecraft are needed to position ourselves

How can we encourage and accelerate more of our companies to pro-actively integrate environmental and social impact into their business models? To put into place better measures of investment performance over the long-term that ties into greater social good?

There is also a real challenge today to lay out a different position for government. One that is more the facilitator, setting out the conditions for  the impact economy ecosystem and  supporting in ways that invest in the longer-term infrastructure and platforms that can scale the innovations and partnerships needed to achieve sustainable, long-term growth.

Government cannot ‘play’ in all three horizon investment areas, it does not have the capacity, experience, capital and resources. We need leaders who not just make tough decisions but set about putting in place the different conditions, incentives and clarification of who does what and why. The more the short-term crisis extends, the harder it becomes for Governments to participate in mid-term future innovation activities. They simply can’t easily.

A time and place where we are converging to make social innovation a critical element

We are in a current battle to address both short and long-term economic and growing social challenges. We are faced with growing unemployment still, especially here in Europe. The youth of today need to engage, otherwise we are in a great danger of losing a whole generation and that has such significant impact on or nearly everything we have in place today.

How are we going to draw upon the imagination and expertise of a broader set of innovators and tap into the entrepreneurs that are out there, to tackle some of these significant societal challenges?

Are we at the early stages of a new economic order with even more disruption?

Of course we might be in the beginning of a very different set of economic factors. We might actually be heading to a completely different type of economy that melds features which are very different from economies previously based on the production and consumption of commodities. Today we are already seeing blurred boundaries between production and consumption.

We need to think about repeated interactions, care and maintenance and not one-off consumption; and a strong role for values and missions that are far more inclusive for society and less focused on individuals; otherwise we end up with a divided society that clash in ways reminiscent of past revolutions where the majority finally rebel.

Are we facing even more instability in the coming years?

The present value equation in our societies is rapidly getting unstable; we need some fairly radical solutions to reverse the existing trends. I think the challenges will only get harder in the months ahead.

We do need to positively disrupt before we get more unexpected disruptions occurring. Innovation needs to play an ever-increasing part in this to explore alternatives and allow those lost from current economic activities to begin to participate and make a contribution where they see there is a future for them.

The post Breaking out of the current economic dilemma needs radical innovation first appeared on Building Your Innovation & Ecosystem Intelligence.

We need to push them a lot harder. We need to move away from business-only innovation into a society based.

The shifts taking place

Society has shifted, is shifting; the consumer is becoming the supplier of content, meaning, of their taste preferences, their emotions and the goods and services they will buy. Mass consumption, the model honed in the 20^th century doesn’t work anymore.

Customers are actually saying “less choice, more say” and seeking deeper self-determination. This personalising of preference can seem more complex for organizations but there are many ways to manage this it requires real change in organizations, oriented to society more, serving them more.

The marketing thinking is in need of adaptation also.
Consumers are searching for better well-being: through health and wellness, connectedness, personal growth and identity and control. Everything is coming more into a ‘context’ economy that places value on customization, adaptability and transformation with the overriding value statement of “what we will value as against what we consume”.

Social innovation becomes increasingly important within communities
Facing a fairly long period of economic restructuring in most developed economies, the consistent globalisation of local jobs, rapid technology change, and polarization of opinions we seemingly are all facing a world of great uncertainty and increasing complexity.

Our governments are searching for solutions. The premium seems to be centred on new knowledge acquisition to add jobs and promote new solutions to tackle unfamiliar or persistent problems within society.

We seemingly can’t afford or tolerate in capital markets anything that seems inefficient, applying unsustainable practices or not innovating well.
Innovation- based on social problems- offers a real meaningful solution for us all.

If we can harness the best ideas for emergent problems, and explore these in a timely fashion we can move beyond our existing crisis. We all searching for personal meaning and society does offer this really.

The four main areas that Social Innovation can address and are all near you!!

1. Resolving the problems around our growing physical needs and limited resources (age, health, education)
2. The increasing need for a different type of skill and capability set that innovation seems to require and often we are not taught- in school, business or society
3. A major shift in care and service- serving the needs of others, communities and those actually close to us
4. Psychic needs- the recognition, increased understanding and care that cuts across our societies in so many different, often in bewildering ways.

Innovation is social, social is the new innovation
Social and interpersonal aspects (social media, networks, relationships) are aspects of innovation that are increasingly being recognised and understood to be critical to the innovation process.

The realisation of innovation needs people, everything else is enablers.

People hold the key role in the innovation process as the creators and carriers of knowledge. They develop it, they translate it, and they consume it.

The increased art of collaboration and co-creation

Collaboration and co-creation is emerging that have the potential to provide those value creation points society requires.

We need to learn how to cooperate. I was reading a book recently by Gaurave Bhalla called “Collaboration and Co-creation: New Platforms for Marketing and Innovation” and he offers a simple but powerful framework- Listen- Engage- Respond.

A society that can be mobilized links the economic, social and environmental spheres; it can have a cumulative dynamic effect if we can harness it.

Pushing society to solve its growing problems needs to happen
We simply do have the capacity to solve our problems but it needs the combination of private, public, voluntary sectors, philanthropists, foundations and society to come together in different ways than we have seen in the past.

That is why we are entering the era of societal innovation and we need to get business even more tuned in than ever.

We need to develop a greater social and cultural lens to translate our concerns, fears and insecurities into beliefs, values and aspirations that offer a vibrant future.

Innovation is now needed in all walks of life- this is our societal challenge.

The post Societal Innovation – challenging our future thinking 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.