Geoff Mulgan on innovation in the social sector
Geoff Mulgan's "The Process of Social Innovation" (2006) makes one think about how government can be better organised to solve challenges in the social arena.
Geoff is the director of Young Foundation, a London-based thinktank which "identifies and understands unmet social needs and then develops practical initiatives and institutions to address them". He is the former Head of Policy for Tony Blair, and the first director of Blair's Strategy Unit. Geoff was ranked in 2004 as one of the UK’s 100 leading public intellectuals.
In the paper, Geoff states that social sectors (i.e. healthcare and education) will account for the biggest share of GDP growth over the next 20 years. However, business innovation models are insufficient in developing good social sector services because these services have a high degree of co-creation - you have a bandwagon of providers (public, private and voluntary organisations) with a wide array of consumers' needs.
To accelerate the pace in which innovative activities and services can be pushed out to solve unmet needs, Geoff has the following suggestions: -
1. Avoid intellectual snobbery - "Some of the most effective methods for cultivating social innovation start from the presumption that people are competent interpreters of their own lives and competent solvers of their own problems."
2. Look for "positive deviants" - i.e. people who are solving problems against the odds. He gave the example of youngsters with poor academic results finding good jobs, or ex-offenders with high likelihood to re-offend but do not.
3. Experimenting is necessary - few ideas emerge fully formed so there's a need for experimentation of the prototype model to see if it can work in reality. Also, experimenting enables the pioneers to galvanise enthusiasm for the project.
4. Creative tools can help - New social ideas are seldom inherently new but is applied to different markets or combined with other ideas to achieve results. To create such possibilities, he gave examples of tools people can use such as Edward de Bono's 6 thinking hats, methods by companies Ideo and What If?, and open source technology on the web.
5. For Governments: Reward outcomes, not outputs for innovations - Governments are generally risk-adverse and poor leaders in recognising innovation. Geoff suggests that governments can contain risks by rewarding outcomes rather than pay for outputs/ activities for projects, and changing attitudes and mindsets by rewarding risk-taking in general. Interestingly, the countries most interested in Young Foundation's work are very different societies: China is interested because she wants to speed up solutions to her profound challenges while the Scandinavian countries are keen to preserve their place in leading the world's social innovations.
Article link: http://www.policyinnovations.org/ideas/policy_library/data/TheProcessofSocialInnovation
