Social Innovation Methods and the Social Economy
By Julie Simon
In 2007, The Young Foundation was commissioned by NESTA to carry out a research project on social innovation. The idea, broadly speaking, was that in fields such as science, technology and business, there were well-established and dedicated institutions, funds, roles and methods for innovation. Nothing comparable existed for the social economy, despite the key role it played in terms of responding to new and unmet social needs. The social economy has always been a source of social innovations (from hospices, fair trade, community recycling etc.) but suffered from fragmentation, lack of evidence about what works and how to translate good ideas into big impacts. Moreover, few people used the language of ‘methods for social innovation’ or even thought about their work in that way so there was consequently very little information about which methods could (or should) be used to generate, sustain or scale up social innovations. The idea of this project was to examine which methods were being used in order to create the beginnings of a ‘knowledge commons’ on the subject.
At the time, the Young Foundation, under the leadership of Geoff Mulgan, had positioned itself as a centre for social innovation. As one of the leading social entrepreneurs in the UK and Geoff’s former colleague from the GLC, Robin was an obvious candidate to lead the project. I was incredibly lucky to be assigned to the project and to work with Geoff and Robin.
In our weekly meetings, which had the flavour of an Oxbridge tutorial, Robin would introduce me to the ideas of Frederick Winslow Taylor, Henry Ford, Paulo Freire, Augusto Boal, William Edwards Deming, Antonio Gramsci, John Dewey, Guy Debord, Christopher Hill, Elinor Ostrom and many others. It was like taking part in an accelerated course in innovation studies combined with radical 20th century political thought. We would each focus on a ‘method’ or two each week. The word ‘method’ was at times used very loosely and I remember producing essays on art and innovation, walking and innovation, and singing and innovation (with a case study on Complaints Choirs). Robin was incredibly humble and not one for self-promotion. So much so, that he would often talk about projects – such as sousveys (as opposed to surveys), popular planning or prototyping green homes - but forget to mention that he was somehow involved. I would spend a considerable amount of time trying to research what sounded like really well established or well-known case studies only to find that these projects had no digital trace whatsoever. Later in the project, these weekly sessions were extended and opened up to my colleagues at the Young Foundation. ‘Tea with Robin’ became a popular fixture; people would drop in and share whatever challenges they were facing and Robin, being characteristically generous with his time and intellect, would provide some wise words and reflections on his own experiences. Working with Robin was a hugely enriching experience – both personally and intellectually.
Social Innovation Methods
Our first task was to develop a conceptual framework for the project – this is set out in How to Innovate: the tools for social innovation. This is where Robin first elaborated his rather unique views on the social economy. For him, the term includes all those areas of the economy which are driven by social and environmental rather than financial imperatives. It therefore includes the state and the charitable sector, social enterprises operating in the market, as well as aspects of the household economy such as informational associations, social networks and social movements. (This is quite different from the more commonplace definitions of the term, which are usually limited to third sector organisations such as co-operatives, associations and foundations.)
Figure 1. The social economy
The social economy is therefore a hybrid, consisting of four sub-economies: the market, the state, the grant economy and the household. However, none is wholly concerned with the creation of social outputs. Critically “each of these sub-economies has its own means of obtaining resources, its own structures of control and allocation, its own rules and customs for the distribution of its outputs, and its own principles of reciprocity”. Each therefore needs to be examined and understood on its own terms.
The question for Robin was whether this new but highly fragmented social economy could develop the capacity to foster and generalise social innovations to match the innovations of the private sector. Social innovation, in this sense, refers simply to innovations in the creation of social outputs and outcomes regardless of their origin. Could the social economy move from a responsive filling of the gaps left by the private market and generate an economic dynamic of its own? What kind of institutions and conditions would be necessary to enable the social economy to match the innovation capabilities of the private market?
The task was Herculean; the social economy lacked adequate capital, methods and skills. There were major gaps in terms of supply and demand. On the demand side, the majority of public and private money is still locked up in older models, providing standardised services to essentially passive consumers. On the supply side, very few initiatives grow to scale, and there is little support to turn promising ideas into big impacts.
Asking whether the social economy could be the source of social innovation, to match the innovation of the private sector, prompted questions at three levels: the micro level looking at the distinct processes of social innovation – how ideas are generated and tested in practice, how projects are set up on a sound financial footing and how they are spread and diffused; the macro level looking at the kinds of institutional conditions required to strengthen the capacity of the social economy to develop and diffuse social innovations; and third, looking at social innovation from a systemic perspective. All three were explored in The Open Book of Social Innovation, which mapped many hundreds of methods being used worldwide to develop new social initiatives.
The first micro level enquiry also formed the basis of Social Venturing. This book focused on a part of the social innovation process which is often overlooked: the process of venture formation. Once an idea has been shown to work, how do you set up a venture on a financially sustainable footing? How can one ensure that its culture and governance reflect its social mission? And how can financing be aligned with the venture’s social mission? There are numerous tensions that arise from a social venture operating in the market. For example, a social venture driven by a social mission most likely has an interest in maximising the spread of an innovation in order to maximise social impact. This leads to a common tension between the need for collaboration and the diffusion of its ideas and practice versus a commercial imperative to limit the spread of this information and safeguard revenue streams. Robin would argue that it was “down to the business and governance models to find a way for ventures to do both, to remain open and collaborative while surviving financially”.
The argument
For Robin, the social economy was as much an argument as it was an observation. He saw and advocated an economic future in which the social economy could play a more prominent and recognised role, not replacing the private market, but establishing “new terms of engagement with it, as well as taking on a more front-line role as innovator and provider”. As such, his project was to socialise rather than replace the market: “working in and against the market” as he would say.
However, Robin’s advocacy of the social economy shouldn’t simply be seen in the context of his rejection of free market conservatism. Of course, his arguments in favour of social innovation were a response to global neoliberalism, the retreat of the state and the growth of individualism and the inequalities that ensued. But it was also a response to what he saw as the ‘Fordist’ state, and the limitations of social democratic labourism, namely overly centralised, bureaucratic models of government and public service provision. According to Robin, neither the state nor the market in their current incarnations were capable of dealing with the climate crisis or ‘intractable’ social challenges such as homelessness, poverty or health inequalities.
In this analysis, Robin was profoundly influenced by theories of ‘long waves’, advocated by economists such as Chris Freeman and Carlota Perez, which connected economic cycles with revolutionary technologies. His starting point was therefore how the new ICT enabled paradigm was extending beyond those sectors responsible for its genesis, and how and whether other sectors (e.g. in health, education, energy, food etc.) might be able to realise the transformative potential of these new technologies in order to meet the problems that have proved increasingly intractable within the old paradigm.
Robin had written extensively about the shift from Fordism to Post-Fordism but during the Social Innovation project, he was starting to see the contours of a new mode of production - what he referred to as ‘The Age of Google’ or ‘The Platform Economy’. This was characterised by distributed production, disintermediation and decentralisation and had significant implications for the social economy. This is perhaps best articulated in Danger and Opportunity, in which he argues that the emergence of a new techno-economic paradigm based on ICTs was helping to generate a ‘new social economy’. This differed from economies based on the production and consumption of commodities, and could be distinguished by: its intensive use of distributed networks to develop and maintain relationships; platforms which dissolved the boundaries between user and producer; an emphasis on collaboration, relationships and repeated interactions rather than one-off consumption; as well as the importance of social and environmental values and missions.
One of Robin’s favourite examples of this new form of distributed and democratic production was the Buurtzorg model of social care in Holland. Started by former care workers in 2006, it was formed as a not for profit to provide care services through autonomous teams of up to 12 care workers. At the time of writing, it comprises some 950 teams and 15,000 nurses. The system of self-management has led to a drastic reduction in overheads (8% as opposed to 25% in comparable organisations). They have cut the costs of care in half, partly by reducing overheads, but also by involving friends and family members in the care of their friends/relatives. Key to the system is the website – essentially an internal platform which provides a range of tools (e.g. scheduling, discussion sites). Most importantly, the quality of care, patient satisfaction and staff morale are all high.
Social ventures such as Buurtzorg were, for Robin, a cornerstone of the ‘civil economy’, namely those parts of the social economy which are independent from the state. Robin argued that the civil economy had been marginalised for much of the 20th Century by the rise of centralised welfare states on the one hand and by the rise of large multinational corporations on the other. However, since the 1970s, there has been a proliferation in social ventures, social movements, philanthropic organisations and associations. Robin charts this remarkable growth in his article, Global Civil Society and the Rise of the Civil Economy, which situates this phenomenon not only in the context of the emergent techno-economic paradigm but also in relation to global neoliberalism.
Clearly, substantial reform, institutional changes and investment are needed for social economy organisations such as Buurtzorg to become more widespread. It will require a massive programme of social innovation: new infrastructures, tools, skills, platforms and forms of organisation. However, the prize is considerable – as Robin argued, it’s the “opportunity for social innovation – for so long marginalised – to take its place on a par with private innovation at the centre of the economic stage”.
What happened next?
The methods project was influential at the time. It resulted in 4 publications (one of which, The Open Book of Social Innovation, has since been translated into Mandarin, Spanish, Polish and Italian). It helped consolidate the Young Foundation’s position as a centre for social innovation and generated considerably more work for the organisation (and the Social Innovation Exchange (SIX) which was being incubated at the Young Foundation at the time) – most notably from the OECD, BEPA and the European Commission.
Indeed, this was one of a number of projects undertaken as part of a broader aspiration by people such as Robin, Geoff Mulgan, Diogo Vasconcelos, Louise Pulford and others, to secure support for social innovation at the highest levels of government in Europe. At the time, the European Commission had already signalled its intention to support innovation and the hope was that this would be extended to social innovation or innovation to address societal challenges. The argument was won and over the last decade the European Commission has been a major supporter of social innovation, primarily through various funding programmes (FP7, EaSI, Horizon 2020), Social Innovation Communities, the annual Social Innovation Competition and incubation programmes BENISI and Transition.
FURTHER READING
Robin Murray, “Taking stock, looking forward” in Ed Mayo (ed.) Co-operative Advantage, Manchester, Co-ops UK, 2015
Robin Murray, “Strengthening Alternative Systems Through the Diffusion of Innovation, BALTA webinar, 18th March 2013.
Robin Murray, “Global Civil Society and the Rise of the Civil Economy” in Helmut Anheier, Marlies Glasius, and Mary Kaldor (eds.) Global Civil Society 2012, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012
Robin Murray, “Cooperation in the Age of Google” a review for Co-operatives UK, Co-ops UK, 2011
Robin Murray, “A Co-operative Idea for the 21st Century”, a review of John Restakis’ Humanizing the economy: co-operatives in the age of capital, March 2011
Robin Murray, Notes on the Characteristics of the Social Economy, 2011
Robin Murray, Julie Caulier-Grice and Geoff Mulgan, Social Venturing, London, Nesta, 2009
Robin Murray, Julie Caulier-Grice and Geoff Mulgan, How to Innovate: the Tools for Social Innovation, London, The Young Foundation, 2008