Social Innovation and Europe’s Recovery

BEPA, Brussels

January 2009 :

Social Innovation and Europe’s Recovery

BEPA, Brussels

January 2009 :

What is social innovation?‘New and more effective solutions to social needs whose value accrues to society as a whole rather than just private individuals ...’

• Involves all sectors – public, non-profit, commercial

• Not technology – but often involves technology

• Not policy innovation – though often involves policy

• Not just invention – diffusion, adoption and scale even more important …

SI as cutting across sectors, dynamic on interfaces

Why does it matter?

i) 10 years after Lisbon Europe lagging on all fronts of innovation ...

•Technology and science•Business•Social innovation•Public services

ii) Big slow-burn issues – ageing, climate change, inequality, hyperdiverse cities – demand innovation

iii) Recession demands rapid, urgent innovation in solutions, macro and micro

Europe has many innovators ...

But Europe does social innovation far less well than innovation in technology and business .... with few dedicated institutions, resources or supports, and poor performance in growing successes

What needs to be done?

Europe needs to systematically support innovation to address its most pressing challenges – with the right support for each stage of the innovation process

1. Mobilise Finance …

• Innovation needs to run through all recovery plans; directing R&D funding to innovation in services (eg new forms of education); structural funds that speed innovation in regions and cities; investment that targets priority fields (eg ageing); opening finance up to citizens, social entrepreneurs, communities

2. Accelerate experiment

• Support for incubators, pilots, zones, venturing, Randomised Control Trials, collaboratives – to speed up innovation, recognising the strengths and weaknesses of each, mobilising entrepreneurialism, local imagination, citizens

3. Build capacity and awareness of methods

• Help public officials, business, NGOs, commissioners to support innovation not crush it

• Professionalise the capacity of innovators and grow the field of intermediaries which play the key role in making it happen, as in science and medicine, and skill in using methods

4. Support cross-cutting networks to accelerate learning

Recession raises the stakes, and the urgency

Public services will need radically more cost-effective ways to deliver jobs, eldercare, health, learning

Cities and regions will need quick learning on how to mitigate recession – keeping people in touch with labour markets, use of buildings and land

Nations and cities will need transformative recovery plans as well as protective ones

• “It is common sense to take a method and try it. If it fails, admit it frankly and try another. But above all, try something.” Franklin D. Roosevelt

Can Europe lead the way?

• Using all its powers – from investment and structural funds to R&D to promote dynamism in all sectors?

• Feeding the green shoots of the new – not just propping up the old?

• Obama has an Office of Social Innovation - what should be here?