Reading innovation

According to Wikipedia, innovation is “new stuff that is made useful … radical or revolutionary changes in thinking, products, processes, or organizations”. It isn’t a new idea, in the 30s the Austrian economist Joseph Alois Schumpeter had called innovation “ideas applied successfully in practice”, but talking about innovation is just as important today as it was then. Mankind faces big, even vital challenges like cutting the carbon footprints of a world used to the material wealth it has achieved; like ensuring people live full and healthy lives; like finally bringing an end to poverty.

The Young Foundation, in partnership with NESTA (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) has published an open book anyone can download from internet for free that talks about the “new stuff” people are creating to answer the challenges of our times.

It describes the methods and tools for innovation being used across the world and across the different sectors – the public and private sectors, civil society and the household – and in the overlapping fields of the social economy, social entrepreneurship and social enterprise. It draws on inputs from hundreds of organisations around the world to document the many methods currently being used.

In other fields, methods for innovation are well-understood. In medicine, science, and business, there are widely accepted ideas, tools and approaches. But despite the richness and vitality of social innovation, there is little comparable in the social field. Most people trying to innovate are aware of only a fraction of the methods they could be using. This book provides a first mapping of these methods and of the conditions that will enable social innovation to flourish.

Other titles in the series are Social Venturing and Danger and Opportunity, both of which are available to download here.