Social Innovation Needs An Update
It’s time to upgrade its operating system.
Social innovation was once at the leading edge for social impact thinking, new products and services, and now seems stalled: what happened? I look at the history and some trends that have influenced the evolution of social innovation from its early popularity to today and suggest ways it can become relevant again. Like any software (human, social or technological), it’s time for an update.
When I first heard the term social innovation in the late 1990s, I was very excited. I was working to bring the first web-focused health promotion programming to the broader world and saw how this (then) relatively new tool (the World Wide Web) could make a big difference. Connecting community groups, public health, and technology developers brought a liveliness to the work of health promotion that I’d never seen before.
In 2006, I established what became one of the only social innovation laboratories for health at the time. My team of more than a dozen sharp-minded, socially engaged, creative thinkers and researchers worked tirelessly with communities, non-profit organizations, healthcare, and technology to engage social innovation in practice.
We blended social organizing with technology development and partnered with academics, governments, non-profits, large and small business…
