What’s the state of play in the fast paced world of social innovation? The Unusual Suspects Festival in London seemed a good place to find out. Collaboration was the theme. The claims made were high. The stakes may be even higher. A dazzling line up of initiatives were on display, backed up by discussions and debates on everything from the future of public services to the role of the arts in social change to the game-changing potential of social entrepreneurs.
Social innovation has an irresistible global appeal. Who wouldn’t be persuaded by the challenge of mobilizing all our skills, energies and creativity to solve the world’s toughest problems? Students are increasingly pursuing social innovation as a career path. The UK government is championing it as a key strategy in the ‘Big Society.’ Initiatives like Shared Lives Plus in healthcare, Code Club in education, and the return of community organizing at Locality were among hundreds of exciting examples showcased at the Festival.
Thanks to the work of the Social Innovation Exchange, the impact of such projects travels to places as far apart as South Korea and Argentina, where innovators are working on similar grand challenges. Innovation is also fast becoming the mainstream in the international development community, with leading donor agencies like Britain’s Department for International Development, USAID and the Omidyar Network throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at innovations linked to poverty, humanitarian disasters and government transparency.
But perhaps this buzz disguises some important biases that undermine the power of social innovation, at least if it aims to transform the systems and structures that perpetuate poverty and inequality. I came away from the Festival with four of these biases swirling around my brain: a bias towards co-optation instead of genuine collaboration; ‘bigger is always better;’ ‘solving problems’ is more urgent than building the capacity to find solutions; and a serial avoidance of politics.