Posted on behalf of Judy Miller, Director, Hilton Humanitarian Prize, Conrad N. Hilton Foundation:
Kudos to SSIR for conducting such a thorough investigation of the latest trend in development—innovation—which is at risk of losing its meaning due to its over-use as the answer to all progress. I was especially delighted that you showcased Aravind as an example of an organization that capitalizes on what it knows how to do well in order to ultimately generate superior outcomes over time. The international panel of distinguished jurors who selected Aravind to receive the Hilton Humanitarian Prize in 2010 recognized that Aravind’s unique and relentless focus on process was indeed innovative. In fact, its model is now being replicated by many other organizations throughout the world. Again, impressive article that should be read by all—especially those who are working in the developing world.
Peter Koestenbaum’s writings having influenced my thinking on this topic. He writes, “Whatever else you sell, you are also selling leadership help to your customers.”
For people who pursue the practice of collaborative innovation within their organizations and communities, I ask, “What does it mean to help people realize their potential for leadership by opening the practice of collaborative innovation to them?”
The practice—the process—can raise the level of leadership. However, to the point of this article, treating “leadership” as an explicit outcome would lead to a never-ending round of contrived scenarios.
This post hit it right on the nail and the elements mentioned are so critical to address as we enter into the dawn of the social innovation movement.
It’s a highly rhetorical movement, in that I constantly hear jargon on sustainability, social ventures, social enterprises, but rarely hear the conversation steer towards the three core challenges within social innovation. I am always expressing the importance of prototyping and failing when implementing innovation. Failure is the only way for an organization to achieve the social impact through innovation.
And YES! How we forget about the charitable sector that includes the leading experts on social impact. I appreciate your scholarly approach to the challenges that are occurring within social innovation. I feel many of us have been informally discussing these challenges for a while, but now we have SSIR to give us the academic proof to back up our positions. Cheers! @virgoproject
so, if you were to pick 5 institutions, which may benefit from reorientation in how they see ‘innovation’,which ones will you pick? which ones will make great torch bearers? which ones will have most influence - politically and money power-wise?
and i wonder if this is only an issue of ‘non-western’ world; i doubt that very much, given the challenges we are facing here at home, the home of innovation. reinterpreting innovation is a challenge for development sector everywhere. Not to see it as an excuse, but legitimacy and resources that development sector gets are on such tight leash, it jumps at every new suggestion that its masters make. Innovation is the new band wagon, who has the luxury to ignore ‘innovation’ in their language?
Thanks to all of you for your encouraging and inspiring comments! I can not stress enough that sharing your thoughts and insights on this tricky topic is incredibly helpful to us. We are in the midst of an ongoing process of making sense of social innovation. In particular, we want to learn how knowledge and how we as scholars can benefit organizations who are working hard to make progress on some issue that they care about. I believe strongly that there must be a particular role for scholarly knowledge that adds to and supports the work that practitioners and consultants and others have done to help us learn from real hands-on experience. But I also believe that we scholars have not made enough of an effort to realize this protential.
Like all of your posts, Paul mentioning the “We put the ‘No’ in innovation” ad triggered all kinds of thoughts. One crucial aspect on social innovation that we have not addressed in the article is particularly challenging. And this is the growing differential between a hypercompetitive and hyperinnovative Western world and the grim reality of poverty for too many. I feel that we are suffering from the famous “Red Queen Effect” - a world where you need to run faster and faster just to stay at the same place. Maybe we also need to rethink innovation in Western societies and give development agencies, NGOs, charities, foundations, social entrepreneurs etc. a break. Then we could do some serious development work that requires perhaps much less social innovation but more long-term and committed action to enable whole regions and countries to catch up. Unfortunately, the “lets put the No in innovation” is not compatible with a system that is locked into a material growth paradigm…
So - thanks again for engaging and please keep sharing your thoughts: it triggers all kinds of ideas!
Innovation is meant to represent ‘something new’ but for many of us living and working in remote areas it just means ‘something old’, presented again in a different way or interpreted a different way or given a new name or explantaion or presented by a different group .... in other words ‘innovation these days, tends to be a concept originally birthed eons ago and over time, aspects of this concept is added to and/or deleted so that another takes credence for its new birth.
Take for example Social Innovation, a new catch cry for an old activity, again those with a conscience wanting to help the poor and/or disadvantage by providing funds, support, people, whatever to non profit ... nothing new, other than a new name and some small efficiency changes, then academia comes along and gives credence to this new wave of thinking, then Governments pick up the new terminology, tursn it into policy and puts funds behind it, then Corporate, non profits and Government Agencies all win the tender contracts to implement this new concept and lol and behold ... we return to the same cycle ... a new thing that was old, gets changed and everyone adds their input to it, then its regurgitated again and becomes new, then it is pushed out into remote areas as new innovation to ‘save the poor and disadvantaged’.
Just like ‘the new 10 years stronger futures’ now replacing the ‘3 years NT Intervention’ for all Territorians… the Intervention didn’t work, no numbers on reduced domestic and child abuse, no increase in children in school, no increased employment in remote areas, no change at all that really supports such a racist policy being supported by both Houses of the Australian Government ... yet, it stayed ... after much research and recommendations, lucky for Government, Academia knows how to interpret these stats and they prove that’‘the Government’s Social Innovation in remote areas’ is working and is very successful (even though reality shows otherwise).
While Aboriginal people have more houses they still live in overcrowdedness; while Govt stopped funding Outstations, they survived and now 3 years later they are now back on the Govt Agenda (a 360 degree turnaround) getting funded again; new RJCP for better education & training and employment opportunities for Aboriginal people (what a joke - how many certificates can an Aboriginal person obtain? Answer: 30 or more and you still receive same same as before) ... yes, now with’social innovation being recognised by Government, in with the ‘old turned new’- let the gammon-ness continue.
Thank you for a very timely and highly interesting article.
Having been an innovation consultant in the Nordics for some time who has grown slightly sick of the whole innovation hype, this article managed to express my thoughts (++) in a very clear and profound way.
I strongly believe that the already established organizations are key in order to drive soiceal progress and I am therefore eager to investigate if some of the insights your share are valid in a Nordic context. Eg.
- does social sector org. in the Nordics perceive innovation as a development shortcut?
- do they understand the positive internal organizational impact that comes from learning from failed innovation?
- do they see evaluate innovation by other parameteres that impact?
- is scarcity of resources legitimize the argument for more innovation?
- are they willing to see innovation as valuable experiments?
Hi Thomas, great that our thoughts resonate with your own experiences! Would be fantastic if you could share your findings from organizations and your work in the Nordics on this topic. Please stay in touch and good luck with your work!
Quite the refreshing read—a common occurrence when reading something on SSIReview 😊
Allow me to make one comment regarding “innovative practices” vs. “incremental development practices.” I would argue that one way to look at the latter as compared to the former is that “incremental development practices” means “incremental innovation.” Looking at it in this light, the former becomes “transformative innovative practices.”
What I mean to say is that in order to improve any system, a spirit and process for innovation must be part of the culture. Aravind, in my opinion, is a very innovative organization, simply not in the way the popular culture likes to think of “innovation.”
Not everything is the iPhone. Sometimes innovation is a thinner iPhone, or one with a better camera, or one with sharper, more tactile screen. i.e. There are many degrees of innovation, and positive social change can result from incremental innovation just as much as transformative—perhaps more so, as you point out.
I read this post with great pleasure. Working for an organization (http://www.bopinc.org) that advocates “Inclusive Innovation” or innovation at the Base of the Pyramid, your blog post relates so much to the questions we have everyday.
After all, innovation is contextual and a process and we insist more and more as mentioned in your post to the value of the process itself in terms of learning and transformative power than only focusing on outcomes. Another way to look at it is to shift the focus from product innovation to business innovation where as much as possible you reuse exiting or slightly adapted products. Nowadays everything (almost) can be made so the real question is for what use…
We are organizing an event November 29th in Amsterdam branded “Implementing Inclusive Innovation” http://www.bopinc.org/events/ . Hopefully you or some of colleagues could attend.
Very interesting article & discussion. It reminded me of The Quality of Mercy, fron Shawcross, the best book about the aid industry ever written and still true. But it also triggered another question and that is If ‘true innovation’ is not stronlgy related to (the development of) tacit knowledge? Peter Blok, Amsterdam
Dear T.J. you raise a valid point - one that challenges us when we study innovation in organizations: what is it that we are trying to explain, when we talk about innovation? or in other words: which types of activities constitute innovation and which don’t? if we label anything as innovation then the term becomes meaningless. I just returned from Madurai talking to Aravind about innovation - they clearly are an innovative organization but much of the benefit they create comes from this culture of constant improvements - every day, everyone tries to find a way to do his/her work a little better and they talk about and share improvements all the time. The aggregate change/effect of these small steps over a period of time is big - while individually they are not particularly interesting. Much change that we then call nnovation really comes from many small steps over long time periods.
But you rais an important point that we struggle with in our empirical work with organizations. I have a proposal how to categorize actions as part of innovation processes or other organizational processes but need to test this more before sharing it.
Thanks a lot for your comments!
Dear Nicolas and Peter - very good to hear from you!
unfortunately, I saw your post to late and missed the Amsterdam conference…
would be great to talk again - its been a while! we are at the moment working a lot with organizations in Bangladesh, India and other parts to understand how they use the term innovation internally and what role it plays for their day to day reality. I see a lot of confusion and ambiguity about innovation even in very experienced organizations. Its actually a very difficult concept to study and we are learning a lot from these rich engagements.
We will do a workshop on this topic at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford on Wed, April 10. Hopefuly, many of you wil come and help us think through these issues.
COMMENTS
BY Jenifer Morgan (SSIR)
ON August 17, 2012 04:42 PM
Posted on behalf of Judy Miller, Director, Hilton Humanitarian Prize, Conrad N. Hilton Foundation:
Kudos to SSIR for conducting such a thorough investigation of the latest trend in development—innovation—which is at risk of losing its meaning due to its over-use as the answer to all progress. I was especially delighted that you showcased Aravind as an example of an organization that capitalizes on what it knows how to do well in order to ultimately generate superior outcomes over time. The international panel of distinguished jurors who selected Aravind to receive the Hilton Humanitarian Prize in 2010 recognized that Aravind’s unique and relentless focus on process was indeed innovative. In fact, its model is now being replicated by many other organizations throughout the world. Again, impressive article that should be read by all—especially those who are working in the developing world.
BY Doug Collins
ON August 22, 2012 07:14 AM
Peter Koestenbaum’s writings having influenced my thinking on this topic. He writes, “Whatever else you sell, you are also selling leadership help to your customers.”
For people who pursue the practice of collaborative innovation within their organizations and communities, I ask, “What does it mean to help people realize their potential for leadership by opening the practice of collaborative innovation to them?”
The practice—the process—can raise the level of leadership. However, to the point of this article, treating “leadership” as an explicit outcome would lead to a never-ending round of contrived scenarios.
BY Elsie Maio
ON August 23, 2012 01:20 PM
“Innovation as process v. primarily outcome.” Now that’s a useful meme.
BY #SEgeek
ON August 23, 2012 03:12 PM
This post hit it right on the nail and the elements mentioned are so critical to address as we enter into the dawn of the social innovation movement.
It’s a highly rhetorical movement, in that I constantly hear jargon on sustainability, social ventures, social enterprises, but rarely hear the conversation steer towards the three core challenges within social innovation. I am always expressing the importance of prototyping and failing when implementing innovation. Failure is the only way for an organization to achieve the social impact through innovation.
And YES! How we forget about the charitable sector that includes the leading experts on social impact. I appreciate your scholarly approach to the challenges that are occurring within social innovation. I feel many of us have been informally discussing these challenges for a while, but now we have SSIR to give us the academic proof to back up our positions. Cheers! @virgoproject
BY Paul Brest
ON August 24, 2012 03:43 PM
The value of sticking with a successful strategy is nicely captured by the Post Shredded Wheat ad: :We Put the ‘No’ in Innovation.”
BY Anuj Jain
ON August 26, 2012 06:04 AM
Great article!
so, if you were to pick 5 institutions, which may benefit from reorientation in how they see ‘innovation’,which ones will you pick? which ones will make great torch bearers? which ones will have most influence - politically and money power-wise?
and i wonder if this is only an issue of ‘non-western’ world; i doubt that very much, given the challenges we are facing here at home, the home of innovation. reinterpreting innovation is a challenge for development sector everywhere. Not to see it as an excuse, but legitimacy and resources that development sector gets are on such tight leash, it jumps at every new suggestion that its masters make. Innovation is the new band wagon, who has the luxury to ignore ‘innovation’ in their language?
enjoyed reading it, thanks very much.
anuj
BY Christian Seelos
ON August 26, 2012 10:43 AM
Thanks to all of you for your encouraging and inspiring comments! I can not stress enough that sharing your thoughts and insights on this tricky topic is incredibly helpful to us. We are in the midst of an ongoing process of making sense of social innovation. In particular, we want to learn how knowledge and how we as scholars can benefit organizations who are working hard to make progress on some issue that they care about. I believe strongly that there must be a particular role for scholarly knowledge that adds to and supports the work that practitioners and consultants and others have done to help us learn from real hands-on experience. But I also believe that we scholars have not made enough of an effort to realize this protential.
Like all of your posts, Paul mentioning the “We put the ‘No’ in innovation” ad triggered all kinds of thoughts. One crucial aspect on social innovation that we have not addressed in the article is particularly challenging. And this is the growing differential between a hypercompetitive and hyperinnovative Western world and the grim reality of poverty for too many. I feel that we are suffering from the famous “Red Queen Effect” - a world where you need to run faster and faster just to stay at the same place. Maybe we also need to rethink innovation in Western societies and give development agencies, NGOs, charities, foundations, social entrepreneurs etc. a break. Then we could do some serious development work that requires perhaps much less social innovation but more long-term and committed action to enable whole regions and countries to catch up. Unfortunately, the “lets put the No in innovation” is not compatible with a system that is locked into a material growth paradigm…
So - thanks again for engaging and please keep sharing your thoughts: it triggers all kinds of ideas!
BY Sarina Jan
ON August 26, 2012 04:54 PM
Innovation is meant to represent ‘something new’ but for many of us living and working in remote areas it just means ‘something old’, presented again in a different way or interpreted a different way or given a new name or explantaion or presented by a different group .... in other words ‘innovation these days, tends to be a concept originally birthed eons ago and over time, aspects of this concept is added to and/or deleted so that another takes credence for its new birth.
Take for example Social Innovation, a new catch cry for an old activity, again those with a conscience wanting to help the poor and/or disadvantage by providing funds, support, people, whatever to non profit ... nothing new, other than a new name and some small efficiency changes, then academia comes along and gives credence to this new wave of thinking, then Governments pick up the new terminology, tursn it into policy and puts funds behind it, then Corporate, non profits and Government Agencies all win the tender contracts to implement this new concept and lol and behold ... we return to the same cycle ... a new thing that was old, gets changed and everyone adds their input to it, then its regurgitated again and becomes new, then it is pushed out into remote areas as new innovation to ‘save the poor and disadvantaged’.
Just like ‘the new 10 years stronger futures’ now replacing the ‘3 years NT Intervention’ for all Territorians… the Intervention didn’t work, no numbers on reduced domestic and child abuse, no increase in children in school, no increased employment in remote areas, no change at all that really supports such a racist policy being supported by both Houses of the Australian Government ... yet, it stayed ... after much research and recommendations, lucky for Government, Academia knows how to interpret these stats and they prove that’‘the Government’s Social Innovation in remote areas’ is working and is very successful (even though reality shows otherwise).
While Aboriginal people have more houses they still live in overcrowdedness; while Govt stopped funding Outstations, they survived and now 3 years later they are now back on the Govt Agenda (a 360 degree turnaround) getting funded again; new RJCP for better education & training and employment opportunities for Aboriginal people (what a joke - how many certificates can an Aboriginal person obtain? Answer: 30 or more and you still receive same same as before) ... yes, now with’social innovation being recognised by Government, in with the ‘old turned new’- let the gammon-ness continue.
BY Thomas Berman
ON August 29, 2012 06:42 AM
Thank you for a very timely and highly interesting article.
Having been an innovation consultant in the Nordics for some time who has grown slightly sick of the whole innovation hype, this article managed to express my thoughts (++) in a very clear and profound way.
I strongly believe that the already established organizations are key in order to drive soiceal progress and I am therefore eager to investigate if some of the insights your share are valid in a Nordic context. Eg.
- does social sector org. in the Nordics perceive innovation as a development shortcut?
- do they understand the positive internal organizational impact that comes from learning from failed innovation?
- do they see evaluate innovation by other parameteres that impact?
- is scarcity of resources legitimize the argument for more innovation?
- are they willing to see innovation as valuable experiments?
Thanks again!
BY Christian Seelos
ON August 30, 2012 07:17 AM
Hi Thomas, great that our thoughts resonate with your own experiences! Would be fantastic if you could share your findings from organizations and your work in the Nordics on this topic. Please stay in touch and good luck with your work!
Many thanks!
BY T.J. Cook
ON September 5, 2012 02:04 PM
Quite the refreshing read—a common occurrence when reading something on SSIReview 😊
Allow me to make one comment regarding “innovative practices” vs. “incremental development practices.” I would argue that one way to look at the latter as compared to the former is that “incremental development practices” means “incremental innovation.” Looking at it in this light, the former becomes “transformative innovative practices.”
What I mean to say is that in order to improve any system, a spirit and process for innovation must be part of the culture. Aravind, in my opinion, is a very innovative organization, simply not in the way the popular culture likes to think of “innovation.”
Not everything is the iPhone. Sometimes innovation is a thinner iPhone, or one with a better camera, or one with sharper, more tactile screen. i.e. There are many degrees of innovation, and positive social change can result from incremental innovation just as much as transformative—perhaps more so, as you point out.
BY Nicolas Chevrollier
ON October 2, 2012 02:48 AM
Dear Christian, all,
I read this post with great pleasure. Working for an organization (http://www.bopinc.org) that advocates “Inclusive Innovation” or innovation at the Base of the Pyramid, your blog post relates so much to the questions we have everyday.
After all, innovation is contextual and a process and we insist more and more as mentioned in your post to the value of the process itself in terms of learning and transformative power than only focusing on outcomes. Another way to look at it is to shift the focus from product innovation to business innovation where as much as possible you reuse exiting or slightly adapted products. Nowadays everything (almost) can be made so the real question is for what use…
We are organizing an event November 29th in Amsterdam branded “Implementing Inclusive Innovation” http://www.bopinc.org/events/ . Hopefully you or some of colleagues could attend.
Nicolas
BY Peter Blok
ON January 25, 2013 07:26 PM
Very interesting article & discussion. It reminded me of The Quality of Mercy, fron Shawcross, the best book about the aid industry ever written and still true. But it also triggered another question and that is If ‘true innovation’ is not stronlgy related to (the development of) tacit knowledge? Peter Blok, Amsterdam
BY Christian Seelos
ON February 4, 2013 01:56 AM
Dear T.J. you raise a valid point - one that challenges us when we study innovation in organizations: what is it that we are trying to explain, when we talk about innovation? or in other words: which types of activities constitute innovation and which don’t? if we label anything as innovation then the term becomes meaningless. I just returned from Madurai talking to Aravind about innovation - they clearly are an innovative organization but much of the benefit they create comes from this culture of constant improvements - every day, everyone tries to find a way to do his/her work a little better and they talk about and share improvements all the time. The aggregate change/effect of these small steps over a period of time is big - while individually they are not particularly interesting. Much change that we then call nnovation really comes from many small steps over long time periods.
But you rais an important point that we struggle with in our empirical work with organizations. I have a proposal how to categorize actions as part of innovation processes or other organizational processes but need to test this more before sharing it.
Thanks a lot for your comments!
BY Christian Seelos
ON February 4, 2013 02:06 AM
Dear Nicolas and Peter - very good to hear from you!
unfortunately, I saw your post to late and missed the Amsterdam conference…
would be great to talk again - its been a while! we are at the moment working a lot with organizations in Bangladesh, India and other parts to understand how they use the term innovation internally and what role it plays for their day to day reality. I see a lot of confusion and ambiguity about innovation even in very experienced organizations. Its actually a very difficult concept to study and we are learning a lot from these rich engagements.
We will do a workshop on this topic at the Skoll World Forum in Oxford on Wed, April 10. Hopefuly, many of you wil come and help us think through these issues.
thanks a lot for engaging with our work!
BY niyateefoundation
ON May 22, 2014 11:36 PM
this is an great post!i read this post with great pleasure.nice article.
Social Service Organization in Odisha