Social innovations are judged by their impact, but in the quest to assess what it does we can miss the way it does it and that is where justice and the emotional connections that justice deals with come into play. Unless we consider social justice a part of social innovation we are likely to exclude as much as we include the very people we need to help bring good ideas to light and promote true social change and development.
Social innovation is most often characterized with emphasis on new ideas and products generated in social ways. The social part of social innovation is what distinguishes it from other forms that don’t require that same social engagement.
Social innovation has been defined in the following ways such as:
” a novel solution to a social problem that is more effective, efficient, sustainable, or just than existing solutions and for which the value created accrues primarily to society as a whole rather than private individuals.” – Phills, Deiglmeier, & Miller (2008)
Social Innovation Generation and Frances Westley describe social innovation as:
“Social innovation is an initiative, product, process or program that profoundly changes the basic routines, resource and authority flows or beliefs of any social system.”
And Geoff Mulgan, the CEO of Nesta in the UK provides perhaps the simplest of definitions:
“Social innovation is a new idea that meets social goals” — Geoff Mulgan (2013)
In all of these definitions the emphasis is on the new idea and the social environment in which that idea is cast. The first of these definitions above is the most detailed and includes mention of those new ideas being more just than those that are being replaced. Frances Westley’s definition speaks to authority flows and Mulgan’s addresses social goals. How social innovation addresses justice, authority flows and social goals is not suggested in these definitions. Indeed, a review of the literature and popular discourse on social innovation finds remarkably little mention of social justice.
Perhaps it is because there is an assumption that social innovation is a positive thing for society that justice is simply assumed to be part of the act. Yet, that is hardly the case in practice. While we may use terms like participatory, engagement, and co-creation in our discussion of social innovation, the manner in which society is part of the process and involved is not well-articulated or is described in vague terms such as “engage diversity”. What does that actually mean? And what does this mean for our connection to community?
The emotional connection
Part of the problem is that innovation gets defined in terms of the product produced and the methods of engagement used to produce that innovation. What doesn’t get discussed is the emotional connection to the innovation and the way that guides participation and engagement. That emotional connection is what sits at the seat of justice.
“Full membership in a community depends on certain feelings, and these feelings are easily starved. A community is a circle of respect, and respect is felt. When any of us don’t feel respected by the community, we withdraw”
Paul Woodruff’s book the Ajax Dilemma explores the matter of social justice and one can’t help but think of how we often neglect this important concept and the emotional way in which people connect to their community or are excluded from that community via social innovation.
Woodruff’s excellent book looks at the complex relationship between people, their community and the means that hold them together, which is justice. He maintains:
“The purpose of justice is to maintain the integrity of a community. It’s not merely what you decide that matters, but how you decide it, and how you communicate the decision”
For social innovation this means ensuring that our ideas are not only sound, but that we have generated them in a manner that promotes justice within the community and that we are clear in how we communicate the purpose and impact of our innovation to the world. This challenges the impression that good ideas are self-evident and that the ends justify the means even if they are well-intended and co-creative. This means that the innovation itself needs to fit and enhance the integrity of the community while simultaneously challenging it.
The communication imperative
The last part of Woodruff’s quote above is the piece that ties justice to making our innovations social. It’s not enough to engage others in our innovation efforts, its about communicating what we’re doing to those that are participating and those that are not at the same time. It means evaluating what we do and documenting what decisions we make along the way to ensure that we make our ideas and their implications transparent to others because, ultimately, an innovation that seeks to transform society is one that won’t always involve everyone, but it needs to consider them.
That consideration provides that emotional attachment between individuals and the ideas that we generate to serve the society in which those societies belong. In doing so we create these new ideas that preserve integrity while pushing the bounds of what communities are and the status quo that isn’t always serving the best interests of society. By communicating ourselves and our intentions and putting justice at the heart of what we do social innovators are more likely to do well and do good at the same time.
(For those interested in learning more about Paul Woodruff’s perspective the lecture below gives a sense of what justice means in general as he discusses what the Ajax dilemma really is).
Image credit: Scales of Justice – Frankfurt Version by Michael Coughlan, attribution to Blogtrepreneur. Thanks for sharing your work Michael.
