Social innovation and partnership

Question 1

Define social innovation

Answer 1

New solutions that simultaneously meet a social need and lead to new or improved capabilities and relationships and better use of assets and resources.

Question 2

Explain social innovation?( 4 things)

Answer 2

1. new approach to address social need (unemployment, child poverty and growing inequalities)
2. social in means and ends
3. help to transform social relations by improving beneficiaries access to power and resources
4. developed with and by users and not delivered to and for them

Question 3

What are sources of social innovations? (4 things) and what are some examples?

Answer 3

1. Private Markets
2. Public Sector
3. Third Sector
4. Households

e.g. fair trade, world wide web, congestion charging, carbon trading and incubators.

Question 4

What are the key characteristics of social innovation?

Answer 4

1. New: new in the context it appears, must be new to the ones involved in implementation
2. Meets a social need: created with intention of addressing social need in positive and beneficial way, also articulates and shapes social needs and can help emerge unrecognised social needs.
3. Put into practice: ideas that have been put into practice, different from inventions (ideas that have not been put into practice)
4. Engage and mobilise beneficiaries: engagement helps to ensure that social innovation serves let goals and involves the members of the target group themselves in addressing and owning their own problems.
5. Transform social relations : aim to transform social relations by improving acces to power and resources of specific target groups
6. Bottom-up approach: emerges from informal processes
7. High level of uncertainty: never implemented before
8. Embedded in routines and structures
9. Unintended consequences: despite good intentions, social innovations can prove to be socially divisive and have unintended consequences that have negative social effects.

Question 5

What is the spiral process of social innovation?

Answer 5

• provide useful framework for thinking about the different kinds of support that innovators and innovations need in order to grow
  1. prompts, inspirations and diagnoses: factors which highlight need for innovation (crisis, public spending cuts, poor performance)
  2. proposals and ideas: stage of idea generation
  3. Prototyping and Pilots: ideas get tested in practice
  4. Sustaining: ideas become everyday practice.
  5. Scaling and diffusion: growing and spreading the innovation
  6. Systematic change: ultimate goal of social innovation. interaction of many elements: social movements, business models, laws and regulations, data and infrastructures and new ways of thinking and doing.

Question 6

What are the types of social innovations that exist? (5 types)

Answer 6

1. New Services and Products: can be old ideas applied in a new context. (homeless purchase discount paper and sell it for profit)
2. New Practices: require new professional roles or relationships. can lead to new form of governance and collaborative action. (enabling users to become producers, sharing economy!)
3. New Processes: co-prodction of new services. (fair-trade)
4. New Rules and Regulations: creation of new laws or entitlements
5. New organisational Forms : hybrid organisation forms such as social enterprises. trades for a social and environmental purpose and with a clear sense of its social mission. (BELU water)

Question 7

What is the role of civil society in promoting social innovation? (6)

Answer 7

1. Finding collaborative solutions instead of competing among organisations
2. Sharing resources and responsibilities to achieve a common purpose
3. Value exchange of info and networking
4. Build user led services
5. Build sense of community
6. Promoting civil engagement

Question 8

What is the role of institutional actors as active players?

Answer 8

1. In building new solutions:
   commitment, partnering, recognise value of target groups, allocate resources, engage and be part.
2. In mainstreaming the new solutions:
   - participate, recognise usefulness of solutions, adopt them, support activities, define new policies taking into account the innovative solutions

Question 9

Explain how partnership is a key driver for social innovation?

Answer 9

Partnership is a key driver for Social Innovation as it:

• encourage collaboration rather than competition,
• focus on individuals and communities strengths rather than their weaknesses
• provides Community based solutions rather than national solutions

Question 10

Evaluate social innovation?

Answer 10

concerned with measuring the impact of a new intervention and help to identify what works, what does not and why

• Due to the lack of standardisation, golden rule, or practice, regarding assessment.
• Importance of Evaluation: Blueprint for success, acceptance of intervention, facilitate access to funding, increase potential of replication of intervention
• Social Return on Investment (SROI), the Social Reporting Standard (SRS), Social Cost Benefit Analysis (SCBA)