20 Recommendations

You can never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. Buckminster Fuller

There are a number of practical, policy and strategic shifts that must be made if we are to harness the enthusiasm of big hearted people to commit their lives (and reputations) to creating breakthrough social innovations with more efficacy than the current models.

1. Challenge assumptions, question received wisdom, debate business-as-usual. As most truly disruptive innovations begin with a reconceptualization of the problem or need, it is vital that individuals and organisation become adept at challenging received wisdom and conventional assumptions. Key is to ensure there are no white elephants or sacrosanct ways of doing things. No recruits and those from outside the space are usually better able to question the status quo than those inside of it. Anthropological research can also highlight where expert thinking and real-world realities do not resonate. Such context-based insights, as well as lead-user programs, such as that pioneered by private sector companies like 3M, can open up opportunities for breakthrough. The X-Prize Foundation and The Buckminster Fuller Foundation are both expressly working towards fostering breakthrough social innovations.

2. Think systemically, act disruptively. Teams must be encouraged to think systemically and holistically, penetrating to the deepest causes possible across the system their ‘problem’ sits within. See reamp.org for a great example of how a major investment in joined up (at least $1 million) thinking – before a cent had been spent on doing stuff – generated (and continues to generate) a disproportionately high real-world impact. The disruptive social innovation process that we have piloted at various social sector events can help to make this kind of thinking quick, low-cost and accessible.

3. Place the human psyche (and the behaviours that stem from it) at the center of social innovation. As the system we rail against is merely a solidification of our collective beliefs, attitudes and behaviours, focus resources on uncovering and then shifting the psychological and attitudinal beliefs that perpetuate problems. Breakthrough innovations are almost always the result of challenging the prevailing assumptions and conventions of the space. The Fetzer Institute funds some interesting projects focused on forgiveness and compassion in everyday life, such as the Charter for Compassion. World Wildlife Foundation has a Sustainable Consumption Unit looking at reducing environmental problems by tackling the root cause – our consumption habits and the desire / beliefs that generate them. Jamie Oliver’s effort to change the mindsets at the heart of the food system; St. Giles Trust using ex-con’s as coaches and mentors to reduce recidivism; and International Future Foundations’ ‘kitbag’ are all interesting. Mayor Bloomberg’s Center for Economic Opportunity focuses on investment in social programs that prioritize responsibility.

4. Incentivise well-considered risk and celebrate the mavericks. Reward financially and socially (via reputation etc.) those exhibiting well-considered risk in social innovation. Celebrate team and collaborative successes behind the big ideas that have ‘failed’ as much as those that have succeeded. Ensure mavericks are no longer vilified and side-lined as they are the source of many new ideas. Choose some team members, board members or advisors because they are risk takers and / or appreciate the rewards of thinking big. The Unreasonable Institute (as well as some social innovation prizes such as the X-Prize, Skoll, Rainer Arnhold, Ashoka and PopTech awards) seem to be working towards doing this. Various private sector organisations have are excellent and encouraging their teams to have bid ideas, most obviously Google’s ’20 percent time’ policy. Programs like the TED Prizes encourage visionary ideas and Unltd in the UK supports active citizens with the seed money to explore their pro-social ideas.

5. Build appetite for ambiguity and patience. Increase the capacity of organisations and funders (and key stakeholders, whether that means wealthy donors or journalists monitoring elected officials) to tolerate, even embrace, ambiguity. This allows innovators to present project proposals that contain unknowable unknowns, and to follow ideas through to completion before deciding what is a real ‘failure’ and what is a key learning for iteration. Ensure managers and those with oversight functions are comfortable with some uncertainty in the projects they are responsible for, particularly in the nature of evaluations and impact measures. Innovating metrics is often key to breakthrough innovation.

6. Clear institutional memories after ‘failure’. If a manager, team or organization is burnt by what is considered a ‘failed’ innovation, it is rare that they will ever try developing something like it again. However many innovations are successful because their creators have the patience to wait until they reach the tipping point, and the skill and commitment to iterate until it is successful. Apple is the pre-eminent example of the clearing away of institutional memories. After their much-publicised failed Newton PDA, most companies would have exited that product sector for good. It is a testament to their innovation culture that they tried again, iterated many times, and ended up with the disruptive success of the ipod / iphone / ipad. Groupon.com., a fast-growing service that came out of ‘failed’ platform The Point, is another example.

7. Leverage available smart and sophisticated tools. Provide innovation teams in government, in non-profits and within programs with the tools and techniques for disruptive innovation, harnessing the billions spent by the commercial sector on techniques for breakthrough thinking. Ensure that teams in organisations have internal champions that can ‘own’ these tools in order to diminish reliance on over-priced consultants; and that people learn how to wield stripped down versions of them that can respond to the reduction in budgets and time. Provide simplified versions to the citizen through online platforms, like the beginning work on a Social Innovation Commons and Ethical Economy marketplace. Some examples of this are the visual business model generation techniques of Alex Ostwerwalder et. al. and our own wecreate peer-to-peer creativity and leadership toolkits.

8. Practice rapid piloting and emergent strategy. Disruptive social innovation demands flexibility of thought and implementation. This means strategy becomes ‘emergent’ rather than linear. Old-fashioned ideals of agreeing goal and strategy and then simply executing it will inevitably fail. The team must be able to adjust and even reinvent the strategy during development and implementation. Rapid prototyping and piloting is crucial to test out and evolve ideas to readiness. Evaluation procedures and measures of impact must again be redesigned to take this into account. TechShop is allowing a new generation of innovators to try out their project rapidly using 3D printers and the like.

9. Mandate participatory design and design thinking in all programs. Ensure is it standard operating procedure to bring end-beneficiaries into the innovation process as equals and valued parts of the design phase. Without their context-rich insights, it is highly likely that services will be launched that do not fit the language, customs, behaviours and cultural complexities that real-people have when they live real lives. People like particple and thinkpublic in the UK and D-Rev, WInterhouse and MIT in the US are making progress in this sphere, as well as those overseas such as Villgro (the Rural Innovations Network).

10. Re-think the professional-client model and deliver services through expert end-users. For scale and sustainability relinquish the expert-user model that limits access for billions of people to ‘professional’ services that they can never afford. The cost of providing enough ‘professionals’ to manage the growing medical, mental health, legal and education needs of the vast majority is untenable. Look to empower end-beneficiaries to become partners in the delivery of service and projects. This reduces reliance on expensive experts and create true social equality. Examples include kickstart.org, Barefoot Colleges, online CBT, Survivor Corps, TEDx, SpecialistInterne in Scandinavia and the civic management in Curitba, Brazil all treat end-users as smart, contributive people.

11. Harness open innovation and be collaborative – from the Cabinet / Board right on down. Rather than just talk about collaboration (and expect those on the ground to do it for one) it is time to make it ‘business as usual’ from the upper echelons to the street-level volunteer. How the leadership work sets the context for the entire organisation. Explore open innovation processes, restructured operational systems and co-development partnerships. This requires a shift from ‘command and control’ management styles to a purposefully collaborative approach which can only happen when leaders make that shift themselves. It demands the humility of all to know that little of any real ambition can be achieved without collaboration; and the courage to let go of the competitive culture that is rife when many people are going after limited funds and positions of conventional power. Above all it demands a certain level of emotional intelligence and leadership capacity amongst all players, at all levels, to overcome the inevitable tensions and blockages that occur in collaboration. Direct funding and resources to collaborative teams and organisations that think systemically, as opposed to glorifying individuals (such as social entrepreneurs who succeed, but only in one part of the system). The current Conservative / Liberal Coalition in the UK might well be the beginning of a powerful new form of collaborative government. The Rockefeller Foundation, Change Connections, Wiser Earth and our partners 100% Open (previously NESTA Connect, are pushing forward these kinds of open innovation models. The Foo Camp series put on by O’Reilly Media and Google offer a glimmer of what is possible.

12. Pool resources for ambitious ideas. Government, leading non-profits and foundations act as conveners to bring together private, public and social sector organisations to foster effective, systemic collaborations on potential breakthrough social innovations by pooling resources. Harness the web to allow citizens and individual social entrepreneurs to pool resources, expertise and experience to generate bottom-up innovations. World Wildlife Fund is convening major collaborations of cross-sector players in a number of key areas of sustainable consumption (e.g. mobility, finance). Services such as Social Edge and Assetmap.com and crowdrise.com also promises some progress in this area as do the Innovative City programs that are fostered by orgs such as Ashoka. Project Masiluleke, a project that has come out of the PopTech Accelerator, is one such ambitious example as is Google’s project 10100 and Pepsi’s Refresh Everything campaign. The Open Data / Open Government / Open Science movements across both sides of the Atlantic might stimulate some transformative and breakthrough ideas.

13. Make social ‘venturing’ – whether in or out of government and non-profits – aspirational. Increase awareness and the social cache of social ventures – whether they look like non-profits or social enterprises – a viable, and potentially more systemic and sustainable, versions of traditional social program delivery. Allow public sector and non-profit managers to develop projects that involve incoming revenue streams which can be used to expand successful projects or develop new ones. There are various ‘intrapreneur’ (entrepreneurs within large organizations) programs in private sector companies that are driving venturing in their sectors, which could be opened up to cultivate public sector intrapreneurs.

14. Harness pro-social human capital from laid off public sector workers and unemployed grads. Leverage the high predicted volume of laid off public sector workers, retired baby-boomers and the cohort of recent graduates, many of whom are unemployed. A high percentage of these groups share a pro-social attitude and desire to serve. Retrain and empower them to explore and implement breakthrough social ventures as an alternative to non-profits or traditional commerce. Research shows that recessions can be good times to nurture higher-risk projects – people have less to lose, and overheads are low. Platform such as allforgood.org are making great headway in tapping into dissipated pro-social urges. Starting Bloc and the Kaos Pilots program is carving our grads who want to be ethical entrepreneurs.

15. Ensure access to risk-friendly proof-of-concept funds not just seed (small) or expansion (large) funds. Create essential funding pots, of both public and private varieties, for Proof Of Concept funding that are accessible to everyone, not just those in the know or in the right elite networks. Ensure that the administrators of these funds understand the risk / reward profiles of potentially breakthrough social innovations and are empowered to develop portfolios in which some projects are assumed to perform below expectations. Ideally some will be former disruptive innovators themselves. Social Impact Bonds may do this, though I fear they will act to generate scale-up funding for successful pilots, not investment in transformative ideas. According to the Economist, New York’s Center for Economic Opportunity “emphasises taking risks, with the expectation of the high failure-rate typical in a venture-capital fund.”10

16. Innovate alternative funding pathways. Overcome bottle-necks in funding by encouraging and reforming regulation to allow for peer-to-peer funding models (such as www.sellaband.com, zopa.com profounder.com, kickstarter.com) to get POC funds to those that need it fast. Create a ‘breakthrough social innovation marketplace’ where citizens, public sector commissioners and philanthropists can view, evaluate and back potentially high-risk, high-reward social innovations. Encourage citizens, corporations and private investors to divest monies into ‘breakthrough social innovation funds’ by affording tax breaks for investment. Those behind the Social Capitals (SOCAP) conference are pushing this conversation forward, as of course are the micro-finance, micro-loan and micro-donations teams at places such as kiva, global giving and more. The ChangeXChange and Buzzbank.org are also ones to watch.

17. Institutionalise a language of breakthrough innovation. Develop and mainstream consistent terminology, approaches and measurement protocols that are commensurate with disruptive (as opposed to incremental) social innovation. Ensure the public and third sector workers understand the value of high-impact social innovators, and crucially what they look like. Those like The Schwab Foundation are working towards this, as are the Buckminster Fuller Institute. The site associated with this paper will begin to collect a bank of precedents and exemplars of breakthrough social innovation, which can in turn help make the language of it more commonplace.
18. Encourage breakthrough social innovation ‘incubation hubs’. Support citizens who want to start social ventures through start-up support and advice at a local and federal / central level. A centralised, online, open access resource containing examples, figures, precedents and best-practice from across sectors with smart tagging and recommendation engines is of intense value. Build up a list of precedents and parallels from other sectors which can be used to inspire and incentivise breakthrough thinking. The Unreasonable Institute, Social Innovation Camp, The Feast, The Young Foundation, PopTech Accelerator, The Hub, Y-Combinator, Enviu and PureHouse are great examples of such hubs, although not all are looking specfically for the breakthrough or radical innovations.

19. Ensure vital industry-wide innovations. The emerging capabilities of the web, such as Google Earth’s platform, afford the potential to massively reduce the costs and increase the accessibility of collaborative innovation processes, systems thinking, innovation best-practise and social venturing funds. The web can also radically improve the weak ties that are so vital in social innovation. These ‘meta-innovations’ will likely need to be invested in by central government or major foundations, those with the foresight, cross-sectorial perspective and motivation to create platforms that can encourage breakthrough social innovation.

20. Understand and leverage multi-platform thinking. Harness every last drop of social impact by ensuring that any breakthrough idea is taken across all relevant distribution channels as well as media outlets, so that ‘marketing’ or advocacy campaigns such as films and short videos become revenue generators for on-the-ground service delivery. IN this way a ‘big idea’ can be delivered into various different contexts through the smart use of technology, media and supply channels. The work of Participant Media is pushing this conversation forward, as are projects such as The Cove.