Social Innovation

The results of social innovation are all around us. Self-help health groups and self-build housing; telephone help lines and telethon fundraising; neighbourhood nurseries and neighbourhood wardens; Wikipedia and the Open University; complementary medicine, holistic health and hospices; microcredit and consumer cooperatives; charity shops and the
fair trade movement; zero carbon housing schemes and community wind farms; restorative justice and community courts. All are examples of social innovation – new ideas that work to meet pressing unmet needs and improve peoples’ lives.

This report is about how we can improve societies’ capacities to solve their problems. It is about old and new methods for mobilising the ubiquitous intelligence that exists within any society. We see the development of social innovation as an urgent task – one of the most urgent there is. There is a wide, and probably growing, gap between the scale of the problems we face and the scale of the solutions on offer. New methods for advancing social innovation are relevant in every sector but they are likely to offer most in fields where problems are intensifying (from diversity and conflict, to climate change and mental illness), in fields where existing models are failing or stagnant (from traditional electoral democracy to criminal justice), and in fields where new possibilities (such as mobile technologies and open source methods) are not being adequately exploited.