What is social innovation anyway?
“Social innovation” sure sounds great, game changing and inspirational. Yet at the same time is obtuse and not seemingly relatable to your everyday work (or try explaining it to your Grandma!). Like most concepts, social innovation can mean different things to different people. We turn to our academic friends at Stanford’s Center for Social Innovation who put a stake in the ground back in 2008 with this refined definition:“Social innovation is a novel solution to a social problem that is more effective, efficient, sustainable, or just than existing solutions and for which the value created accrues primarily to society as a whole rather than private individuals.”For Grandma, it could mean a better way to deliver homecare services so she can live an independent life in her home. For a nonprofit, it could mean creating a new structure within the organization that generates earned revenue thus maximizing its ability to provide more services to their clients. For a community, it could mean a new form of financing through contracts with private funders where government only pays for successful outcomes.
Why is social innovation important?
Social innovation is not a new concept. In fact, social innovation has been a national priority. In 2009 the White House created a program called the Social Innovation Fund (SIF) that awards grants to identify and promote promising approaches to challenges facing local communities. For SIF, “social innovation” means “new ways to solve old problems that are faster, cost-effective, data-driven and lead to better results for the public good.” The fund supports programs beyond the start-up stages that are already showing signs of effectiveness, and have the potential for greater scale. And we’re on board with that model.We believe that social innovation is critical to solving our most complex community problems. We need creative solutions, entrepreneurial minds, different kinds of business models and nontraditional ways of funding to make real progress. We need collaboration between the nonprofit, public and private sectors. And we need to take off our individual lens on the world and see things in a new way. We must share values, shift our roles and responsibilities to assume some we’ve never done before.And lucky for our community, Austin’s mayor, Steve Adler, feels the same way. In his recent city address, he talked about some of our community’s key problems in affordable housing, transportation, homelessness and how it will take “inclusion, innovation and intentional improvisation” in order to see real progress.The world needs more social innovation. In Austin, we’re primed to set a leading example of how our entrepreneurs, leaders, funders and change agents across all sectors can make a meaningful impact. At Greenlights, our job is to help make it happen. If social innovation has peaked your interest, you may want to check out the upcoming AustinNext event where you can hear from amazing, local social innovators and find opportunities to get involved with social innovation right here in Austin.