What we've learnt about social innovation over the last three years...

What we’ve learnt about social innovationover the last3 years

Christian-Paul Stenta

Wednesday, 5 December 12

TACSI:A new kind oforganisation


We’re not a government agency


We work closely with government - but we’re not a government agency

We’re not an academic institution


We work closely with research - but we’re not an academic institution

We’re not a service delivery organisation


We incubate new solutions - but we’re not a service delivery organisation

Policy

Social services Community

Business

Social innovation laboratory

Social change


Laboratory which works across traditional boundaries between policy makers, social services, business and the community to develop solutions that lead to measurable social change.

DESIGN BUSINESSSOCIAL SCIENCE COMMUNITY PRACTITIONER

Interdisciplinary team


We do this by creating teams with skills, knowledge and experiences that draw from a range of differing disciplines. We work with social scientists, public servants, designers, business analysts, community developers, management specialists and educators.


We’ve spent the last three years working on the ground in South Australia exploring ways to create positive social change. We’ve explored many different issues. Some of these issues include:

X


Taking pressure off an overburdened child protection system through the co-creation of Family by Family as a new model of family support


Creating a cultural revolution to change our attitudes towards binge drinking by investing in Hello Sunday Morning.


Taking a new model of urban regeneration which started in Newcastle, replicating the model in Townsville and Adelaide, and now scaling the model through the development of a national organisation which is building the capacity of cities to transform their neighbourhoods to generate both social and economic outcomes

WeaversCare

Reflect


Exploring the implications of an ageing population and ways we can enable Great Living in late adulthood, with a specific focus on improving outcomes for carers

Tjungu


And finally exploring Indigenous entrepreneurship in remote communities by investing in and mentoring the development of sustainable cultural tourism in central Australia.

We’ve also explored different methods to generate and incubate innovation:

facing our communities.

Aged Care Digital LifestylesEngaging older people with technology to improve their quality of life in aged care facilities.

Employment Pathways for Deaf StudentsCreating access to employment for the hearing impaired through development of workplace tools, technology and training.

Renew AustraliaPlacing creative, social and cultural initiatives in empty or disused buildings to re-engage people with underutilised urban areas.

Tjungu: Learning CountryBuilding community capacity and social entrepreneurship with indigenous communities across the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunyjatjara lands in central Australia.

AroundYouConnecting people with their local neighbourhood and building community through events, activities and services online and in mobile devices.

Hello Sunday MorningAddressing Australia’s binge drinking culture and encouraging individuals to take responsibility and change their drinking behaviour.

Sharing Universal Stories of DepressionRaising awareness of depression among culturally and linguistically diverse communities.

Who Gives A Crap?™Turning consumers into philanthropists – a social enterprise selling environmentally sustainable toilet paper that will donate its profits to support environmental conservation and reforestation in Australia and water sanitation in the developing world.

Tjungu: Learning CountryBuilding community capacity and social entrepreneurship with indigenous communities across the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunyjatjara lands in central Australia.

Who Gives A Crap?™Turning consumers into philanthropists – a social enterprise selling environmentally sustainable toilet paper that will donate its profits to support environmental conservation and reforestation in Australia and water sanitation in the developing world.

Bold Ideas Better Lives Challenge winners


Social innovation challenges to develop and test out new ways of creating change and building the capacity of social entrepreneurs


Online crowdsourcing platforms to promote and share local solutions & methods that work


By bringing social innovators from around the world to Australia to share their work and methods with us in order to build the capacity of the Australian social economy


and a new kind of social problem solving by turning on its head the way we approach social problems and resetting the role of people and community in developing local solutions and influencing policy development


Over these three years, we’ve learnt a lot about social innovation, the social economy, different ways of doing things and what it means to be an incubator within the Australian context.


Learning from and reflecting on the experiences of organisations like TACSI is critical if we are to grow, mature, sustain and scale not just our practices, methods and solutions, but the social and economic impact that we’re generating.

Today I’d like to share some of the initial insights born from our work over the last three years, and our current thinking around how we can scale innovation to create systemic change. I do so not to say that we have or know the all answers - but in the hope that it inspires discussion and debate amongst you today, and to give some insight into how we can create the conditions that are required to promote and value experimentation in the social sector.

1. What social innovation means to us2. The kind of innovation we’re trying to create3. How we go about doing this4. Principles


So in the interests of keeping it as simple as possible, we’re going to stick to four key things:

1. What social innovation means to us2. The kind of innovation we’re trying to create3. How we go about doing this4. Principles

What is social innovation?



Put up your hand if you spoke about...

Outcomes. People. Outputs. Research. Technology. Impact. Measurement. Systems.

Social innovation is an extraordinarily broad concept. It means many many things to many many people.

“The development and implementation of new ideas (products, services and models) to meet social needs”Geoff Mulgan et al, In and Out of Sync


If you’re an social entrepreneur, perhaps its about throwing out the rule book and testing out a radical new idea you’ve had. However, innovation isn’t always a new idea. It could be the further development of an existing idea or set of ideas and replicating them in a new context.

“A true social innovation is systems-changing – it permanently alters the perceptions, behaviours and structures that previously gave rise to these challenges”Centre for Social Innovation, Canada


If you’re a social scientist or social policy maker, perhaps its more about rethinking the institutions which underpin how our society works, or reshaping what we do and how we act by rewarding particular behaviours as has been done with other movements such as financial incentives to promote recycling.

Social investment:generates social & environmental benefits, and that may or may not generate a financial return.Centre for Social Impact


If you’re a funder of innovation, perhaps its about new ways to get the best bang for buck, improving access to social finance, bringing together new players to develop partnerships and models which enable investment in early stage innovation and experimentation, or rethinking the existing relationships between government, philanthropic, community and private sectors in order to improve the way we currently fund and deliver social services.


Different people will have different definitions for, and understandings of, what they mean by social innovation. They will also have different motivations and value sets which drive and influence what they do, how they do it and why they do it. Whilst there is always a danger and risk that we’ll spend far too much of our time fussing over and deliberating over a definition that can encompass the diversity that exists within this ecosystem, it is important that firstly, we do have a sense of what social innovation means to each of us, and secondly, that we consider how this influences the way we communicate what social innovation means for society at large.

For me personally, social innovation is ultimately about connecting our hearts and our minds. Our knowledge only has power when its driven by well understood values, and leveraged by collaborating with people and communities.


At TACSI, we define social innovation, and in turn what we do, in two ways. One is concerned with the sandpit we play in - the kind of systemic change we try to create by developing methods and incubating solutions (the knowledge). On the other hand, the other aspect to how we define our work is centred around a set of core characteristics which define not just what we do, but how and why we do it. In one sentence, for us social innovation is about being intentional and doing meaningful things which are useful on the ground, in peoples lives.

What are we trying to innovate?

Source: Charles Leadbeater


Creating things which are useful can only be done when we are clear about what it is that we are trying to innovate. Charles Leadbetter, leading thought leader and provocateur, describes a hierarchy within social innovation whereby we start with individual services/practices. We then build organisations and systems, this is followed by creating platforms, leveraging movements/networks and finally transforming ideologies.

Services/Practices





Services/Practices


Organisations




Services/Practices

Systems


Organisations




Services/Practices

Systems

Platforms


Organisations




Services/Practices

Systems

Platforms

Movements/Networks


Organisations




Ideologies

Services/Practices

Systems

Platforms

Movements/Networks


Organisations




BOLD IDEAS, BETTER LIVES CHALLENGE

WANT TO KNOW MORE? Applications are now open online at tacsi.org.au (applications close April 23rd). For more info check out the website or email [email protected]

The Australian Centre for Social Innovation is giving you the chance to turn your big idea into big impact. We’re committed to supporting up to 10 projects that deliver the best and brightest ideas in social innovation across Australia. Your idea could deal with anything from healthcare to climate change, unemployment to housing as long as it addresses a social need faced by communities in Australia.

Got a bold idea for creating better lives for people in Australia? Want access to amazing mentors and a bucket of cash (up to $1million) to get your idea off the ground?

Services/Practices

OrgsPlatforms


Our work over the last three years has been mainly focussed around three of these areas: we are developing new services & practices by radically redesigning the way social services work; we’ve developed new platforms such as the $1M Bold Ideas Better Lives Social Innovation Challenge; and lastly, we’re building organisations - by developing curriculum around our approach to social problem solving, and also by building incubators such as TACSI as well as thematic incubators such as The Great Living Co which seeks to generate innovation in ageing.

in system out-of system

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How can we improve customer experience?

Sustaining

Disruptive

OutsideInside

Sustaining

Disruptive

OutsideInside

Sustaining

Disruptive

OutsideInside

Sustaining

Disruptive

OutsideInside



As well as understanding what we are trying to do, how we do it - how we build knowledge and leverage experience - has played a key role in our approach to innovation. Reflecting again on Charlie’s segmentation of the innovation process, he describes two main approaches - sustaining and disruptive innovation.

"Sustaining" focuses on innovation that can be incorporated into the existing practices of organizations. “Disruptive” innovation on the other hand, seeks to disrupt existing models of success. It requires different models to succeed. Both sustaining and disruptive innovation can occur within and outside of existing systems.

Sustaining innovation inside of a system is about improvement. The goals are the same, but innovation is driven by improving existing means.

Sustaining innovation outside of the system is about combination. Again, the goals are the same, but we use a different mix of means to arrive at those goals.

Disruptive innovation inside of systems is about reinvention. We have revised goals, and different but still institutional means.

And finally, disruptive innovation outside of the system is about transformation. Different goals arrived at by very different means.

But this isn’t to say that they don’t sometimes conflict - improvement can at times be the enemy of transformation. However, no one approach is better than another. All four need to co-exist within an ecosystem if we are to create systemic change.



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If we think about how to translate this framework into our day to day experience lets’ consider public service innovation. This is an in system response that traditionally sits in the sustaining space. Here we seek to answer the question: “How can we improve user experience of our current services?”

TACSI’s approach to social problem solving, Radical Redesign, sits in the disruptive out of system quadrant, where we try to answer the question: “How can we mobilise community resources to improve outcomes?”

We’ve also started exploring opportunities to work within systems more recently, with the prototyping of a new solution called Care Reflect that seeks to enable Great Living in Late Adulthood by developing new developmental and reflective practice models for professional support workers.

Family by Family, the first social solution to come out of TACSI, is to date our most developed example of disruptive innovation that sits outside of traditional systems.



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PUBLICSERVICES

How can we improve user experience of our current services?








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RADICALREDESIGN

How can we mobilise community resources to improve outcomes?

PUBLICSERVICES









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RADICALREDESIGN

How can we mobilise community resources to improve outcomes?

PUBLICSERVICES


How can we create services that contribute to improving outcomes?






Family by family videohttps://vimeo.com/50653317


Family by Family is disruptive in nature because we not only recast the roles of professionals and community, but we turn the whole process of problem solving in child protection on its head. Families themselves become the resource.

PROBLEM

OUTCOMESPOLICY

PRACTICE

SOCIAL IMPACT

policy making

Top-down policymaking osten fails to reach a personal level


Traditional policy making is a vertical process: decisions at the top flow down the chain of command. People are often the last to be reached.

design thinking

PROBLEM

OUTCOMESPOLICY

PRACTICE

SOCIAL IMPACT

Bottom-up design osten fails to reach practice and policy


Bottom up approaches such as design thinking is practice focussed but often unable to influence or shift policy and decision making.

PROBLEM

OUTCOMESPOLICY

PRACTICE

SOCIAL IMPACT

policy making

design thinking

PROBLEM

OUTCOMESPOLICY

PRACTICE

SOCIAL IMPACT

working backwards

SOCIAL IMPACT

PROBLEM

OUTCOMESPOLICY

PRACTICE


Our problem solving approach effectively works backwards because we start with people. First, we work with people to identify what people want and can do before co-designing and prototyping new kinds of solutions and ways of spreading those solutions (e.g. principles, platforms, organisations, and services). Each phase of our approach starts with a question. To answer the question we draw on skills and tools from design, social science, business and policy development.

ethnography

co-designprototyping practice prototyping metrics

business case

Look & Listen

Create

Grow

Prototype

Ourapproach


The first phase, LOOK & LISTEN, asks the question: What are good outcomes? and uses ethnographic methods to better understand what life is like for people.

The second phase, CREATE, asks the question: What ideas could improve outcomes? and works with people to develop new ideas and interactions.

The third phase, PROTOTYPE, asks the question: What interactions shift outcomes? and prototypes those new practices. We then test out their effectiveness by asking, What value did those solutions create?

The final phase, GROW, asks the question: How can we spread the solution?

We believe in5 principles


Doing this kind of work and using this kind of approach over the last few years, has taught us that social innovation isn’t just defined by the methods and practices we use, but that in order for solutions to be truly transformative, to tap into our potential as human beings and to leverage every day experience as a resource, our practice must be grounded by something else. The principles and values which underpin what we do, how we do it, and why we do it. These principles communicate the motivations for our work, what we see as its role and purpose and place, and the qualities which define and drive our methods and practices.

These principles have come out of our experience, from things that have worked really well, but also from things which haven’t worked at all. These 5 principles come from our learning: the successes and the failures.

We believe in

Thriving1


Our first principle is that we believe in thriving

We aspire to enable people to live great lives. We believe people need more than to 'bounce back' from crisis; they need to move beyond 'getting by' toward thriving.

“Life satisfaction in the US has been flat for fisty years even through GDP has tripled”Martin Seligman, Flourish. 2011, p233


Today, the core challenge for most of us living in the West isn’t how long we live, but how we live - how we age, how we work, how we connect to others. We don’t just want to get by - to be insured from risk or protected from social circumstance - we want to be able to thrive. We want to have fulfilling relationships, to find and use our talents, to feel good and in-control, to have a purpose, to enjoy how we spend our time, and probably most of all, to know we matter as people and not just as workers and consumers.

Of course not everyone in the West has experienced the gains from the last century. 22% of households in the UK are designated low income, 15% of people in the USA live below the poverty line, and life expectancy amongst Indigenous Australians is at pre-industrial era numbers.


If we truly want more people to thrive, we need social solutions that can broaden our preferences and motivations, teach us new skills, provide us with feedback, cultivate support networks, help us feel competent & in-control, and remove barriers to change.

Thriving Lives are lives where we actively develop our aspirations, capabilities, relationships and achievements. Lives where we feel good and in-control.

We believe in

Outcomes2


Our second principle is that we believe in outcomes

VIDEO SLIDE

Our solutions create and measure change in what people do, say, think and feel. We believe success is about creating the kind of change that's valued by people rather than simply meeting targets set by systems.

Our experience with the Bold Ideas Better Lives Challenge showed us the importance of focusing not just on the idea itself, but on the theories underpinning how change happens. Replicating and scaling impact with high fidelity is impossible if you can’t pin point the specific steps to arrive at those outcomes.

Family by family videohttps://vimeo.com/50653317


We believe in

Co-design3Look & Listen

Create

Grow

Prototype


Our third principle is that we believe in co-design

The best way we know to create solutions that work for people in context is to develop solutions with those people in that context, and to keep working with them to adapt those solutions over time and for new contexts.

Care Reflect videohttps://vimeo.com/53371455


We believe in

Peer-to-peer4


Our fourth principle is that we believe in peer-to-peer

Our work on the ground frequently reveals the untapped human resources in our communities. We've seen how these can be harnessed and shaped to create positive outcomes for all involved.

Weavers videohttp://vimeo.com/53379675


We believe in

Scale5


And our fifth and final principle is that we believe in scale

We design our solutions so they can grow and scale. We believe things that work should be spread. Whilst we’re still developing our approach to scale, our hunch is that we require three key ingredients:

Photo of building a business case


Firstly, we are tapping into business thinking to create business models and systems which underpin and support the growth of our solutions. Business modelling enables us to approach replication, spread and scale sustainably and with rigour and intentionality.

Photo of building capability


Our second hunch is that scale requires us to build capability - both internally and externally. This is about skills within solutions, skills within incubators like TACSI, and building capability more broadly amongst practitioners and policy makers, and across the social economy. At TACSI, we recognise that this is something we haven’t done a great deal of in the past, and that it this is an area in which we need to dedicate more resources, which is why we have created a new role within our organisation that focuses on ways to build our collective capability around co-design and social problem solving.

Photo of creating partnerships


Our final hunch is that partnerships and coalitions play an essential role in scale. Partnerships and coalitions are formed by champions who believe in the value of innovation and doing things differently. Partners might be a mix of practitioners, organisations, foundations, government agencies, and other interested parties.

Coalitions are not just informed by specific tasks that need to get done, but rather are built with collaborative relationships in mind, recognising the individual contributions and experiences that people and organisations bring to the table, and bound together by a common set of goals, principles and values.

We’re currently actively seeking champions to partner with us to grow our approach to problem solving, to further develop our solutions for families and older Australians, to radically redesign more solutions to other social challenges, and to build co-design capability across Australia.

The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking that created them.Albert Einstein


Australia is in a strong position to be demonstrating global leadership in social innovation. We have a strong economy, characterised by low levels of public debt and an abundance of natural resources. What can be achieved through cross sectoral leadership is evident right here in Western Australia.

Leadership from government has led to dedicated funding for social innovation and social enterprise.

Leadership in giving is demonstrated through the continued growth of organisations like Giving West.

Leadership amongst corporates is evident through partnerships between business and local incubators such as SiiWA and Pollinators.

Leadership in social financing continues to be demonstrated by organisations like Lottery West.

The conditions for transformative, disruptive social innovation exist here in WA. The challenge moving forward is how we can harness these resources in a way which activates and grows a culture of valuing experimentation - in particular, innovation which disrupts the status quo, transforms systems, and in doing so, creates new goals and aspirations in, with and for people.

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@ozinnovation + @cstenta

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tacsi.org.au/publications

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What we've learnt about social innovation over the last three years...

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