Our most significant social challenges – such as those associated with an ageing population and environmental sustainability – are resisting conventional approaches to solving them.
The UK currently suffers from a lack of capacity for developing the social innovations necessary to meet these challenges. In particular, it lacks sufficient capacity to find and appropriately scale successful solutions to maximise their benefit.
Social innovation often relies upon different incentives from traditional commercial forms of innovation. While our understanding of commercial innovation has developed considerably in the past 30 years, the evidence base on social innovation remains weak.
The mechanisms for stimulating social innovation – and especially how to support scaling in ways that enable local ownership – need to be investigated in a systematic way through a programme of practice-based research.
Published
March 2007
Author
NESTA
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