Together with the other volumes in this Series, we hope that this work provides a stronger foundation for social innovation based on the different experiences and insights of its pioneers.
we want this work to grow and develop. Your comments, thoughts and stories are welcome at the project website:
So, for example, there is more innovation around self management of diseases and public health than around hospitals; more innovation around recycling and energy efficiency than around large scale energy production;
but by distributing complexity to the margins to the local managers and workers on the shop floor,
With this emphasis on the individual has come an interest in their experience as well as in formal outcomes, in subjective feedback as well as the quantitative metrics of the late 20th century state and economy (hence the rise of innovations like the Expert Patients programmes, or Patient Opinion.
involving users at every stage as well as experts, bureaucrats and professionals; designing platforms which make it easy to assemble project teams or virtual organisations.
and quickly reflect on what works and what doesn't. 10 THE OPEN BOOK OF SOCIAL INNOVATION End notes 1. Murray,
The OECD's LEED Programme (Local Economic and Employment Development which includes a Forum on Social Innovations,
identifying and implementing new labour market integration processes, new competencies, new jobs, and new forms of participation,
Through experiment it is discovered then how these work best (such as the discovery that giving computers to two children to share is more effective for education than giving them one each.
and programmes that work well for one group may fail for others. Where governments in the past focused on typical or‘average'citizens,
Service users are responsible for all stages of the research process from design, recruitment, ethics and data collection to data analysis, writing up, and dissemination.
which started as a research and development project and now works with a wide range of service users across the UK. 1 PROMPTS,
what works, including many counter-intuitive findings. 7 The circuit of information New needs can also be brought to the fore through effective feedback systems.
and have been transferred with remarkable results to the medical treatment of patients in the US. 8 17) Feedback systems from front line staff and users to senior managers and staff.
This could include front line service research to tap into the expertise of practitioners and front line staff
and invisibility of garbage workers. 12 She set out to do the 1 PROMPTS, INSPIRATIONS AND DIAGNOSES 23 opposite of
She decided to shake the hands of every one of the 8, 500 employees of the Department, across 59 districts,
Each year, up to four internationally renowned experts spend between two and six months helping the government to identify problems
and artists to work alongside the policy team to create lateral comments on the issues.
and labourers who discuss and reflect on their farming practices. In the evening walkers stay in villages and hold meetings with local residents to discuss activities of the Honey Walking to discover innovation at the grassroots.
or why a group of young people don't find work. These models have to use multiple disciplines
Ideas come from many sources, e g. citizens, service users, communities, front line staff, other sectors, or other countries.
and producers such as the work undertaken by design consultancies like IDEO, thinkpublic, Participle, and Live/Work or the Hope Institute's citizen teams formed around public service improvements.
One recent example is IDEO's work with the SPARC centre at the Mayo Clinic (see-plan-act-refine-communicate),
which involved turning an internal medicine wing into a laboratory designed to improve patient-provider experiences.
The wing is now a permanent section of the clinic where staff and doctors can develop and prototype new processes for improving service delivery.
while allowing greater freedom of movement and freeing up financial and staff resources. The idea is to then refocus the prison day
'and the work of consultancy firm What If? 42) Forum theatre is a form of theatre developed by Augusto Boal in Brazil, in
which actors and non-actors play out stories of oppression (abusive husband mistreating his wife/factory owner exploiting the workers etc.).
or between landowners and labourers. Or, spectators might choose to depict a more local problem like the lack of fresh water,
which aims to generate new ideas from frontline staff through quality circles. These are usually based on the idea that frontline staff have better knowledge about potential innovations than PROPOSALS AND IDEAS 33 A Theatre of the Oppressed workshop in Philadelphia, USA, with Augusto Boal as the facilitator in the middle.
'called for a system of management that was based on collaboration between management and staff what he called, a system of‘profound knowledge'.
and thus constantly decrease costs. 3 44) Quality circles are a group of employees who volunteer to meet up to identify,
The aim is to tap into the experience and insight of front line workers, who are placed often best to identify problems.
One example is the work of‘activist architect',Teddy Cruz. Cruz uses‘waste'materials from San diego to build homes, health clinics and other buildings in Tijuana.
and the idea that‘the expert knows best'.'Many of these methods have been helped greatly by the ability of the internet to draw in a far wider range of people
such as the World bank's Development Marketplace which seeks ideas from development practitioners and their own staff,
One example is the work of Children's Express in feeding children's views into the design of ideas for estate regeneration
2002)‘ Learning Works: The 21st Century Prison.''London: Do Tank Ltd. 2. See Boal, A. 1979)‘ Theatre of the Oppressed.'
One of the common themes of contemporary social innovation is that it often works best by moving quickly into practice
RCTS have been used increasingly in fields such as welfare to work. They are seen often as a gold standard for evaluation,
or groups of front line workers, professionals, and citizens. Within universities the usual form is a grant,
These may be‘skunk works 'or more like corporate venturing units whose primary target is the number of spin-off enterprises created. 98) Paying for time.
Taking innovative front line workers out of service roles and putting them into incubators or prestigious time-limited roles to turn ideas into business plans (with the time costs then potentially turned into equity or loans).
Allowing staff in an organisation to vote on which ideas and projects should receive early stage funding.
For example, tendering for innovative approaches to cutting graduate unemployment or street homelessness, encourages bids by teams with the capacity to develop concepts to scale,
Business models that work are themselves a prime area for social innovation. They are as diverse as business models in commercial markets,
and of influencing the way the sector works. 107) Incomes and outcomes. There are a range of social business models that involve recognising the potential value of a venture's assets
but to do so it involves those with some measure of private interests finance, staff, suppliers, and purchasers.
or workers, or participants, but their culture is social, are committed to the communities in which they operate, providing work, services, and support.
Examples include Japanese food consumer co-ops, and the Mondragon family of co-ops in Spain. 115) Mutuals.
which specialises in work-based mentoring projects. Based on the idea that‘everyone remembers their first boss'
Working Rite matches an unemployed young person with a skilled tradesman and supports the young person through a six month apprenticeship.
and the staff who carry them out. Yet the success of a social venture depends on an integration of the two.
and in part through the engagement of board members in the active work of the venture.
and engaging members and stakeholders. 124) Consumer shareholding can be used to involve consumers more directly in the work of a venture,
because they are effective and well understood models. 127) User orientation and autonomous work groups.
Large commercial organisations have moved away from hierarchical organisations to models where there are relatively autonomous groups of front line staff, supported by the technical staff, and management.
and discipline to front line staff formerly supplied by hierarchical managers. The manager's task in this case is to assess variances in performance
Operations The distinctive value and values of a social venture show up not just in its structures but in its operations how it works with others, uses technologies or works in partnership. 131) Socially-oriented supply chains.
but it also needs to avoid processing in plants with poor labour records. It often takes time to build up robust supply chains of this sort
and the relationships between a venture and its staff and volunteers. Conventional accounting takes little account of this intangible capital,
and with its own staff, board and volunteers. With many of them there will be formal agreements,
as well as motivation from within, on the basis of its ideas and the way it works to realise them.
'Investing in human resources to ensure a social venture's openness is as important as investing in a building or machine.
Visits from external experts can be an aid to training and formation or, as in the case of SEKEM, they can keep an organisation open to new ideas and models.
Many ventures are by their nature information intensive in respect to the quality and tangibility of their work, the stories of those involved in it,
A workplace should provide a clear and engaging insight into the work that goes on and culture that rests within the organization.
and make their workplace into a working gallery or museum. They demonstrate much of their work visually, through photos and graphs.
Some arrange tours and generate income from them. For example, Vauban in Freiburg, Germany, and Bo01 in Malmo, Sweden, are examples of low-carbon communities
as well as see the work of the employees and staff. It is always a useful exercise for a venture 4 76 THE OPEN BOOK OF SOCIAL INNOVATION to consider how it could best present its work
and its social purpose tangibly as if it were a gallery 140) Open events to provide an opportunity for organisations to engage a wide variety of people in the work of the organization.
They are an occasion for experiencing the venture's culture. Events of this kind are much more important for social ventures than commercial ones.
Developing its staff is important, not only for the venture itself, but to create a group of individuals able to put the ideas into practice more widely.
what is considered equitable with respect to all staff, volunteers, and the venture's beneficiaries. 144) Valuing the voluntary.
then the experience of the work and of contributing to a social goal has to be powerful enough to persuade them to continue.
if it makes one of its goals the attraction and effective employment of a wide range of volunteers.
There are similar issues of effective supply (the proof that a particular model works) and effective demand (mobilising sources of finance to pay for the idea or service).
The challenge of the 21st century is to find out what works and scale it up.
effective supply refers to the growth of evidence to show that the innovation really works.
Diffusing demand The promotion of social innovation has tended to focus on the supply side and how innovations can be diffused among service providers through experts,
intermediaries, and collaboration. However, we argue that the design of services should start from the user,
and diffuser of social innovation. 5 86 THE OPEN BOOK OF SOCIAL INNOVATION 160) Promotion and marketing of innovative services and programmes to encourage behavioural change.
Examples are the‘5 a day'campaign, the promotion of free smoking cessation services, and the new NHS campaign‘Change4life'which promotes healthy activities such as playing football,
and decides what he/she needs in terms of staff and equipment. The parent company supports the new company until it is financially sustainable only then can the old and new companies compete against each other.
or growing an organisation's innovative capacity by investing in the professional development of staff.
There is a central role for academies, apprenticeships, and training programmes. One example 5 SCALING AND DIFFUSION 93 Organic farming students at Everdale.
A good example is the work of ASA (the Association for Social Advancement, or Asa meaning hope in Bengali) to develop an alternative to Grameen in microcredit in Bangladesh.
It works with councils in developing good practice through a network of online communities, web related resources and peer review.
One new initiative by Open Business is the creation of a database of open business models. 199) Barefoot consultants.
There is an important role for consultants and those with specialist knowledge who can act as knowledge brokers and advisers in the new systems.
It is best if they seek to diffuse information, acting as educators, rather than protecting their knowledge through intellectual property
But it can only work if operations can be codified under enforceable rules. Without codification, it is difficult to ensure quality
Maison Bengal is a fair trade company that works with artisan cooperatives and NGOS in Bangladesh.
web and technical support, policy work, media and PR, and internal/external evaluations. While the franchisees are responsible for fundraising,
Metrics to show what works and what deserves to be grown There are many metrics for judging
Over several decades a great deal of work has gone into the design of measures of social value.
and employing some 1. 5 million staff. It is involved already heavily in innovation through investment in research and development on pharmaceuticals and medical instruments
and girls expertise Pilot Tool kit Development Finalize summit definition Validate Indicators Test Acceptance Our Work Portfolio M&e The Work of Others Global Health Agenda Girls Database
The Nike Foundation's work to develop the ability of adolescent girls in developing countries to deliver social and economic change to their families
when you should work, learn and retire. This idea leads to a range of innovations in everything from employment law
and pensions to volunteering and urban design. 1 241) Radical democratisation, taking the principles of popular sovereignty into new spaces, from the mass media to local government and the workplace.
This involves a wide range of issues from the use of the web to the nature of technology and the design of distributed systems which provide spaces for people to contribute to projects directly,
The Expert Patients Programme (NHS/EPP) is an example of this trend, where citizens with particular medical conditions provide advice and training sessions to others with similar conditions.
experts, and local citizens. Together they formulated and implemented a series of community-based interventions intended to prevent the incidence of cardiovascular disease.
Examples include bans on smoking in workplaces in part of Europe, and on advertising billboards in São Paolo, Brazil. 262) Enforcement.
So while familiar data on income, employment, diseases or educational achievement continues to be gathered, there is growing interest in other types of measurement that may give more insights into
The commission recommended far-reaching changes, including paying attention to non-paid work, rethinking the contribution of finance to prosperity,
and broadly agreed roles for different sectors for example to create a new system of apprenticeships in green industries,
and academic journals which sit alongside consultants adept at looking at companies'IP, or their R&d pipelines, spotting patterns
These individuals can work within, or across, organisations. They can be involved in adopting or adapting existing innovations.
or replicated. 277) Innovation champions are individual consultants who produce ideas, network to find what else is being tried,
Some work within organisations, either within or across departments, some are set up to encourage collaboration across organisations,
and the Ministry of Employment, to bring together government, private enterprises, and the research community under one roof to promote user-centred innovation.
They are shared much more than work spaces. They are places where social entrepreneurs, community activists, nonprofits,
284) Innovation hubs are shared work spaces which are designed specifically to promote collaboration and innovation such as CAN Mezzanine in the UK, Social Fusion in the US or the worldwide Hub,
and this theory underpins much of its work. This theory is based on a pyramid with three levels:
when you One of the São Paolo Hub members Taís Carolina Lucílio da Silva Sales Consultant for companies that develop eco products and designer of a line of eco-clothing.
The model is based on the premise that organisations often underestimate the potential value of innovations being developed by their own staff.
employing 90 staff plus another 60 in the summer months. It runs residential and day courses and is generally an animator of new environmental technology. 299) Innovation accelerators bring people together to quicken the initial stages of innovation.
and action research collaboratives such as the Young Foundation's work with local authorities on neighbourhoods and wellbeing. 303) Service collaboratives such as the UK's Primary Care Collaborative,
and social entrepreneurship. 305) Action learning sets are groups of between four and seven people who come together on a regular basis to reflect on their work,
all of them leaders and experts in their respective fields. 138 THE OPEN BOOK OF SOCIAL INNOVATION Innovation platforms There are different types and forms of platforms, but in the main,
new tax and pension rights and other rights for different types of paid and voluntary work;
and NGOS, exemplified in the work of Philips in developing new models of The State The Market The Household The Grant Economy The Social Economy Source:
and engaging individuals as workers. In some cases, firms have used the particular relations that characterise households as a channel for selling.
and compulsory targets for the employment of people with disabilities. This is also the case with household-generated innovation.
Rewards can take the form of recognition, promotion or finance. 317) Appropriate risk management. Public agencies tend to be fearful of risk.
should be part of personal development plans. 319) Circuits of information from users to front line staff and senior managers.
and help make Dutch society‘smarter'(see methods 17-21). 320) User engagement has been helped both by user groups themselves and by professional organisations providing methods for engaging citizens.
including civil servants from the Regions, politicians, experts, and citizens. Participants raise their own questions, and by the end of the day, are expected to produce visualized scenarios and proposals.
But there are also many tools for encouraging staff to innovate, from managers to front line workers. 323)‘ Top slicing'departmental budgets for innovation, for example,
1 per cent of turnover as a rough benchmark (similar to the proportion of GDP now devoted to government support for technological and scientific research and development).
such as lower unemployment. 327) Holistic local budgets such as the New deal for Communities, which gave local communities wide discretion on how to spend large sums of money (typically around £50 million over ten years),
ensuring the work continues even after government funding stops in 2010. Image courtesy of Andrew Hayward/Centre West. 1 152 THE OPEN BOOK OF SOCIAL INNOVATION 329) Online budget-setting tools.
and like many bonus systems can lead to major problems of fairness (who was really responsible for the innovation?),
whether the investment leads to lower pressure on hospitals and acute services. 374) Bonus payments on spending aligned to social outcomes such as the UK Government's Performance Reward Grant for local area partnerships
Employment Zones allowed contractors to innovate new methods for getting unemployed people into work, with payment linked to outcomes rather than inputs and outputs. 379) Differential tax,
including the employment of people with disabilities, regulations for renewable energy, fiscal measures, and planning conditions. 383) Creation of new legal forms
Innovation from the workforce The close involvement of the workforce in innovation has been a feature of Toyota's methods of work organisation that has spread to manufacturing and service industries over the past 25 years.
Similar practices are now being introduced into some spheres of public service (notably in healthcare) as well as closer engagement with trade unions in the improvement of service quality. 391) Public sector unions
and manual workers have resisted innovations (particularly ones involving changes to demarcations). However, in other cases, unions have helped drive innovation,
such as the Fire brigades Union in the UK which helps firemen find part-time employment as benefits advisors alongside their roles as firemen,
management and trade unions in a quality programme for upgrading public services. 392) Supporting front line workers as innovators such as the joint IDEO/Kaiser permanente (KP) project in the US.
and has now been implemented in every ward in 35 KP hospitals. 393) Tithes of working time to generate collaborative public innovation an extension of the Google model where engineers are encouraged to spend 20 per cent of their time developing their own projects.
or freeing up time for public sector workers to volunteer for socially innovative projects. 394) Secondments of public sector employees into‘skunk works',innovation teams,
who work for a day a week with the public workforce to develop innovative service ideas. 397) Secure employment innovation models
which separate project failure from redundancy. Examples include funding a range of parallel projects to test out innovations with job security,
so that individuals can be transferred from failures to successes. 398) Accreditation, search and recruitment of public innovators by commercial headhunters or government agencies.
For example, with accredited lists of individuals with proven track records who can be employed quickly onto projects.
The Neighbourhood Renewal advisers in the UK are one example. 1 166 THE OPEN BOOK OF SOCIAL INNOVATION Inside-outside collaboration An important area of public sector innovation has been to encourage collaboration
between public service workers and civil society, and make the boundaries between them more fluid. 399) Inside-outside teams linking civil servants with social entrepreneurs and those working with communities,
000 volunteers contribute to the UK NHS. 401) Secondments of public sector employees to community organisations and private enterprises,
how open-source democracy can make government decision-making more expert and more democratic.‘‘Democracy Journal.''No. 7, Winter 2008.1 SUPPORT IN THE GRANT ECONOMY 167 2 SUPPORT IN THE GRANT ECONOMY Civil society and the grant economy are the most common sites of social innovation in campaigns
and what mix of funding for individuals, teams The State The Market The Grant Economy The Household 2 SUPPORT IN THE GRANT ECONOMY 169 and enterprises works best,
and democratise the sector's source of finance. 416) Intermediaries for contributions in kind provide labour
human resources and IT consulting services. 417) Philanthropic‘ebays'.'Philanthropic platforms such as Volunteermatch which help people find volunteering opportunities in their local area. 418) Donor platforms, such as Globalgiving, Altruistiq Exchange, Network For good, Firstgiving and Guidestar.
and employment for the rural poor. 420) Venture philanthropy focused on innovation in particular sectors, such as the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's (RWJF's) Pioneer Portfolio which specialises in health and IT. 421) Philanthropic mutual funds such as the Acumen Fund and the Global Fund for Women. 2 SUPPORT IN THE GRANT
The students work Processing bamboo as part of Prosperity Initiative's plan to transform the bamboo sector in Northwest Vietnam.
while exposing members of staff to new working cultures and experiences. Legislation and Regulation Grant-based organisations operate within a set of laws and regulations
It works at the local, national and regional level, with organisations including non-governmental organisations, trade unions, faith-based networks, professional associations, nonprofit capacity development organisations, philanthropic foundations and other funding bodies, businesses,
And business has seen increasingly engagement in social issues as a source of new ideas, reputation, and recruitment.
attracting talent (particularly younger people who want to believe that their employer has a social conscience;
and from community/voluntary associations to‘work insertion'organisations, and companies limited by guarantee. Social enterprises can generate income in a myriad ways.
or Work Ventures in Australia. 444) Consumer co-ops such as the Japanese food co-ops which have 13 million members.
companies and organisations which are responsible for exploitative labour practices, cause harm to people and planet or are at odds with the values and mission of the investing organisation.
The MONDRAGON group is now the third largest industrial group in Spain it has built up a network of 140 worker cooperatives and employs over 100,000 people.
As yet, very few resources have been devoted to labour market development. However, developing skills within the field of social enterprise is critical to the growth
delivered by prestigious graduate employers, business schools, think tanks, sector leaders and others. 486) Lessons in social entrepreneurship such as the programmes offered by INSEAD and the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford's Saïd Business school.
which link people's spare hours to employer needs. This was proposed originally in the mid-1990s as a Guaranteed Electronic Market (GEM),
and emerging thinking on creating markets for other social‘bads'(such as criminality or unemployment), to accelerate market innovation to meet social and environmental goals. 490) Markets for goods'.
and to their terms of funding and employment? Who will provide the necessary tools and platforms?
donations, charging for some services to cover the costs of 100 400 350 300 200 150 50 250 0 Germany Italy UK France Finland USA Paid work
Unpaid work Leisure Housework, paid work and leisure (Minutes per day and person, latest year available) Note:
Issues such as the distribution of working time, the valorisation of voluntary labour, the content and channels of life skills learning, the role of many of the social and educational services, the arrangements for retirement and unemployment, the size
while providing incentives to creators by enabling them to retain some rights over their works.
which allow academics to publish works online for free. Valorising the voluntary Another set of methods have tried to give formal value to time in the household.
or the rights to sabbaticals provided in some professions. 505) Flexible terms of formal employment to enable a sustainable informal economy,
such as the right to request flexible working time. 4 SUPPORT IN THE INFORMAL OR HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY 201 506) Training for volunteers the provision of training and incentives for volunteers,
SPICE has established more than 40 projects in South Wales whereby institutions like local authorities, schools, colleges and housing associations grant time credits for various kinds of volunteer work
or equivalents such as Ithaca Hours that represent a specified quantity of labour time. With Ithaca Hours a unit is valued at $10,
and while most work is valued as one unit, certain professionals like dentists are allowed to value their hour more highly.
In this scheme someone works for an hour helping an old person with shopping or housework. If they work outside the hours of 9am to 5pm they get one
If they undertake body care work they get two hours. The time dollars they receive can
or‘reverse strikes'such as road building by the unemployed in Sicily. 3 4 SUPPORT IN THE INFORMAL
Image courtesy of Mike Russell. 4 SUPPORT IN THE INFORMAL OR HOUSEHOLD ECONOMY 205 517) Users as producers such as the Expert Patients Programme,
which mobilises citizens who are not teachers to work in schools. 518) Producer-consumer collaboration, such as Community Shared Agriculture, in
117 Expert Patients Programme 116 Extremes 36 Fabian society 48 Facebook 75; 138; 207 Fair Trade 119;
200 Liftshare 198 Limited liability Partnerships (LLPS) 65 Linux 139 Live Work 31 London Climate Change Agency 158 Mapping 17-19
Italy 49,71, 183 Toffler, Alvin 204 Toronto Atmospheric Fund 160 Toyota 18,33-34,164 Trade Fairs 95,99, 126 Trade unions 164,178 Transition
154 White house Office of Social Innovation 132 Wikipedia 138 Wikiprogress 120 Wiser Earth 178 Wordpress 138-139 Workplace as Museum 75 Work
His recent work has focused on new waste and energy systems and on projects in the social economy.
We now have over 60 staff, working on over 40 ventures at any one time, with staff in New york and Paris as well as London and Birmingham in the UK.
This book is about the many ways in which people are creating new and more effective answers to the biggest challenges of our times:
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