Social innovation

Written by Anton Shelupanov, Associate Director at the Centre for Justice Innovation (CJI). CJI’s website is http://justiceinnovation.org/ Hate crime is a highly emotive issue, and not someth...

How can the public sector promote and benefit from social innovation? This question is being answered in a new book which recently hit Danish book stores. It’s translated title is ”Crea...

Do you run an innovative project or programme in nutrition, water or rural development? Or are you aware of any projects that should win a prize? Nominate it for the Nestlé Prize in Creating...

On the 17th and 18th of February, twenty-five different partners from around the world gathered together in Dortmund for the kick-off meeting for the SI Drive project, funded under the European Uni...

In the past fortnight, J.K. Rowling broke many of her young fans’ hearts when she revealed that she didn’t believe her characters Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger to be ideally suited t...

On Friday I attended the WILCO final conference which took place in Brussels. The project has generated some real insights and for me personally, identified a number of issues which are worth furth...

In a recent study for the European Parliament (EP) , DTI and partners analysed the extent and role of so-called ‘smart cities’ in Europe, defined broadly as cities seeking to address pu...

Accessing financial resources has been and remains to be a major barrier for social innovators. Their widely acclaimed potential to contribute to solving severe problems of modern societies is seve...

The latest newsletter from the TEPSIE project is now online. Read it here

New scientific educational thought "Innovation .... that's it!" is the idea came from Dusica Birovljevic Master of Law, who, for years, along with her father, writing a professional l...

Its official name is ‘Laboratorium Ratownictwa Medycznego i Procedur Medycznych’ (Emergency Medicine and Medical Procedures Laboratory). Such ‘hospital simulator’ is the fir...

Nesta, Tepsie and Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) are hosting Social Frontiers, a research conference on social innovation at GCU's London campus in East London on 14th and 15th November 20...

In a recent supplement to the Stanford Social Innovation Review, Francis Westley argues that social innovation and resilience are mutually enhancing. Westley is an expert on the subject and leads t...

The Annual Grantmaker’s Association conference, which was organised this year by the European Foundation Centre in Copenhagen, 30 May to 1 June 2013, is a global get-together of philanthropic...

The Satellite Account for the Social Economy published last April by the Portuguese National Institute of Statistics includes the results of a survey on volunteer work done in 2012. Here are some o...

One of interesting projects in Poland is the "Integrated support system of social economy” (in Polish: Zintegrowany system wsparcia ekonomii społecznej, ZSWES) which started in the midd...

The latest newsletter from the TEPSIE project is now online. Read it here

In March 2013 ResPublica published a new essay collection entitled ‘Making it Mutual: The ownership revolution that Britain needs.’ Within its pages, policy-makers and practitioners cal...

Social Innovation: blurring boundaries to reconfigure markets brings together some of the leading thinkers from the field of social innovation and provides a wide array of perspectives, insights an...

This is another blog-post in our thread about lessons learnt from the work with social welfare and other social economy organisations in Portugal. These organisations are under an increasing pressu...

In our previous blog-post we talked about the FAS Project, a nationwide training-action project of the confederation representing social welfare organisations in Portugal that has been going on sin...

This is a blog which explores what co-design looks like in Poland, examining the specific example of participation in a project involving children with complex needs. I have posted the first part o...

On Friday April 12, Social Innovation Exchange (SIX) and TEPSIE hosted a TelePresence discussion exploring the potential for mapping and measuring social innovation. We heard presentations from two...

Private social welfare organisations are, by far, the main providers of social welfare services in Portugal. According to the preliminary results of the Social Economy Satellite Account for 2010, t...

The latest newsletter from the TEPSIE project is now online. Read it here.

In the last decade the global food system has become more hierarchical and complex than ever; the customer has become further detached from the sources of their food while a handful of large compan...

The concept of the ‘sharing economy’ – a world where access to goods and services trumps ownership – now has major traction. The concept is being proved by the success of nu...

KaBOOM! Using the internet to scale impact Darell Hammond and Dawn Hutchison founded KaBOOM! in 1996 after Hammond read a tragic story of two children suffocating to death while playing in an aband...

A major pillar of the TEPSIE project’s research is looking at the impact of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) on social innovation. It is relatively easy to make a strong case th...

Social innovation is a completely new term for Greece. The Greek social economy is not yet developed or better to say is quite fragmented while the voluntarism rates are quite low, unlike other Eur...

Is social innovation a phenomenon that should take place completely detached from the realm of government? Should local governments just let go and let social innovators invent and drive the local ...

In this guest blog, Ute Stephan, Malcolm Patterson, Ciara Kelly outline their recent research on how organisations can drive social change. Organisations, both small and large can play an important...

Impact Investment Impact investment is a growing field looking to find market solutions to the problems of global poverty. It aims to achieve good financial returns while creating positive social o...

Research related to innovation is often associated with technical and technological innovations, i.e. new products and services. Modern socio-economic research has led to the emergence of new forms...

Social enterprises and social innovation are closely related concepts but the relationship between them is not well understood or explored. For example, the assumption is often made that all social...

When comparing the structural configuration of Social Economies across Europe, it becomes evident that associations are a significant share of the population. However, people tend to associate asso...

Approaches to Research on Social Innovation: Learning from One Another for the Future Last week, I attended a really interesting research seminar hosted by WILCO. The WILCO consortium brought toget...

Announcing a new call for forward-thinking research on social innovation Today we’ve published a call for proposals for a major research and policy conference on social innovation, to be held...

Transforming whole systems has never been more important. Youth unemployment, poverty, addictions, crime and criminalisation, low levels of educational attainment amongst vulnerable groups and home...

In 2012, the Rockefeller Foundation commissioned research looking at some of the methodologies that are leading to social innovations around the world, with a particular focus on Africa and Asia. A...

Carlota Perez is one of the world’s most influential thinkers on innovation and its relationship with economic growth and development. She describes ‘great surges of development’ ...

What does citizen engagement mean in the context of the disparate types of activity we understand as social innovation? We have suggested a framework that can help us to organise our thinking about...

"Mine is better: how do you know your good practice is the best?” – the European Alliance for Families (EAF) Best Practice Workshop, 21 November 2012 in Brussels. TEPSIE contribute...

The big deal – how European notions of social innovation go head-to-head with the San Francisco sharing economy hotbed. Read the full report on the joint TEPSIE-MESHLABS workshop on “so...

In late September 2012, the “Danish Municipality Network on Social Innovation” was launched in Copenhagen, Denmark. With representatives of around one-third of Danish local governments ...

While in some European countries social innovation flourishes contributing to the creation of new jobs and the sustainable development of local economies and societies, in Greece, the concept of so...

One of the key strands of TEPSIE work we’re leading at the Young Foundation is looking at the relationship between citizen engagement and social innovation. Although participation and engagem...

Over three days this September, academics and practitioners working in the field of social innovation and social enterprise met for the International Social Innovation Research Conference (ISIRC), ...

On June 19th 2012 it was announced that 10 million guest nights had been booked on Airbnb, an online service that matches people seeking short-term accommodation with people who have rooms to rent....

On 24-25 September, researchers, policymakers, social entrepreneurs and other key social innovation actors gathered in Copenhagen in Denmark and Malmö in Sweden to discuss solutions to Europe&...

At the Ignite Athens event in September 2012, Neelie Kroes (the European Commissioner for the Digital Agenda) talked about the importance of what she terms disruptive innovation using ICT as the ke...

Despite the growing interest in social innovation among policymakers, foundations, researchers and academic institutions around the world, there is currently no common definition of social innovati...

In recent years, the social sector has neared consensus on the need to improve measurement and evaluation of its work and impacts. Although several different methods are currently in use, it is wid...

The Danish welfare system is traditionally based on a large public sector. With the average working Dane paying 44,2% in marginal tax, the public sector is expected to be the actor that detects soc...

Today, more than 1.5 billion people worldwide have an account on a social networking site, and almost one in five online hours is spent on social networks. These figures are highlighted in a recent...

On 6 October 2015, experts from both sides of the Atlantic gathered at the German Center for Research and Innovation in New York City to discuss what success factors lead to lasting social change, ...

On the 30th of July, 2015 the report: ‘Exploring the role of ICT-enabled social innovation for the active inclusion of young people’ was released. The report was commissioned by the Eur...

The European Social Innovation Competition has been running since 2012 in memory of Diogo Vasconcelos, a Portugese leader who focused strongly on fostering innovation to meet societal challenges. T...

Why should social innovators and investors step up efforts to advance gender equality? What kind of gender equality innovation could make a difference that can be felt in people’s everyday li...

Calling all Social Innovators - help us to help you! We are looking for exceptional cases where Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) have boosted social innovation and created better a...

The CRESSI Project is a four year project funded by the EU’s Seventh Framework Programme that was initiated in February 2014. CRESSI explores the economic underpinnings of social innovation, ...

Most people would say they are in favour of creativity in public services, but many have struggled to implement this in practice. As part of the Royal Society of Art's (RSA) ‘Power to Cre...

On the 12th March, Nesta held an event titled 'Collective Intelligence: Evidence based activism in Patients' Organisations'. I was delighted when I saw that Nesta was hosting a discussi...

I have just read an article by Krzysztof Wittels entitled “The era of the social capital. Forgotten achievements of Warsaw enterprises 1864-1939” and published at the leading Polish por...

The Polish scientists headed by Professor Krzysztof Tchoń from the Department of Cybernetics and Robotics, Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland, have created a social robot that can communicat...

Understanding barriers to social innovation By Karsten Frøhlich Hougaard, senior consultant, Danish Technological Institute Why are we not witnessing an explosion of social innovation initia...

Three pressing social problems and the startups that could solve them. Healthcare costs – Sentrian Long term conditions such as heart disease and diabetes account for fully 70% of the NHS&rsq...;

One of the most known Polish private university, Kozminski University, organize for the first time postgraduate studies on "Social innovation in the economy". The aim of the study is to p...

Although we tend to primarily concentrate on the voluntary sector and the social economy to track social innovation, we have always emphasised that it can and does also occur in the sector of priva...

Nationwide Meeting of Social Economy (NMSC) is organized in Warsaw, Poland on 23 and 24 October, 2014. It is the eight Meeting and, as in the previous editions of NMSC, organizers invite social ent...

Written by Marlieke Kieboom, research advisor at Kennisland. Marlieke designs new research methodologies and learning infrastructures for teachers, civil servants and professionals. And she likes w...

It is often said that social innovation is a broad church, with researchers coming from many different disciplines – sociology, business studies, urban planning, economics etc. However, one s...

The ALS #icebucketchallenge is thriving and obviously causing some debate in and beyond social media these days. And it goes like this: In front of a camera, a person pours a bucket of ice water ov...

As part of Tepsie’s work on the ecosystem necessary to support social innovation, I recently conducted some research on social innovation labs. Social innovation labs aim to provide a neutral...

(Written by Łukasz Gajewski) Our engagement in Working Package 8 of the TEPSIE Project leaded us to find examples of Social Innovation in Central and Eastern Europe. In a case of Eastern Europe it...

This blog has been written by Konstantinos Modikos and Christopher Kennard. The evaluation of social impact is a very important aspect which is fundamental for every social innovation intervention....

Over one year ago I posted information on the first social innovation in Poland. This year the second competition is going on. National Centre for Research and Development (NCRD) announced Social I...

On 19-20 May 2014, the European Commission’s DG Research and DG Employment organized a potentially ground-breaking conference on “social policy innovation”. A mixed audience of ov...

As part of our Tepsie work on spreading social innovation, we have completed a series of case studies examining the growth of individual innovations. In one of these case studies we looked in detai...

This guest post from SPRU Senior Lecturer Adrian Smith explores the relationship between concepts of grassroots innovation and truly democratic innovation. This post is based on Adrian's contri...

Recent years have seen a growth in the use of ‘evidence-based policy’, a movement which has grown out of the success of evidence based medicine, and healthcare research networks such as...

Problems of Social Economy and Social Innovation become more and more particular in Poland. As a kind of response to demand for knowledge of that matter School of Public Administration at the Unive...

March saw the first conference of the Accelerator Assembly Network at the BBVA Innovation Center, in Madrid. Accelerator programmes provide training and mentoring for cohorts of businesses, aiming ...

When people discuss social innovations, they often focus on the successful cases which have spread far and wide. But to what extent does this reflect the reality of social innovation? And what does...

For the first time in Poland, NESsT and J. P. Morgan are organizing jointly "Competition for Social Enterprise - 2014". The aim of the Competition is to support the development of social ...

Last Wednesday, the INNOSERV team hosted its final workshop in Paris, marking the end of this two year project looking at social services innovations across Europe. This was a great opportunity to ...

“What do pirates, terrorists, computer hackers and inner city gangs have in common with Silicon Valley?” It turns out that the two young ladies' project entitled ‘The Misfit E...

Wroclaw Centre for NGOs Support SECTOR 3 was founded in April 2007. Ii is carried out by the Foundation for the Support of Non-Governmental Organizations UMBRELLA in the form of a public task and i...

This blog was featured on the Guardian Social Enterprise Network's Innovation Hub. You can read the original article here. The idea of scaling or scaling up has become a kind of holy grail for ...

This post was written together with Jimmy Kevin Pedersen, senior consultant at DTI. At best, a national strategy puts forward a common vision, sets a clear direction and sends a clear message to al...

On Wednesday 11th December, Social Innovation Exchange and Tepsie hosted a Telepresence discussion exploring methods of financing social innovation. We heard a presentation from Gunnar Glänzel...

What’s the link between social innovation, systemic change and societal transformation? This blog has been written by Julie Simon. Over the course of the two days of the Social Frontiers conf...

Polish social entrepreneurs, encountering barriers in their actions, often thought with envy about their colleagues from other European countries. Paulina Wajszczak acquitted the fifteen errors, ch...

At the beginning of November, we have participated in the “Hello Impact” event which took place in Athens, Greece. This event was the second step towards the launch of the Impact Hub At...

A recurring theme at Social Frontiers was the question of how best to research social innovation. In a session dedicated to discussing this issue, we heard four papers that took distinct approaches...

After a year of planning, Social Frontiers finally arrived last week. The two days were full of great presentations, and discussions from researchers across the world who are focusing on social inn...

Here in the research team at The Young Foundation, we are gearing up for Social Frontiers which takes place this Thursday and Friday. The event, held at Glasgow Caledonian University’s London...

Last month I attended an event at The RSA: “Are Service Users The Key To Systems Change?” This featured Dr. Charlie Alcock of MAC-UK in conversation with Chris Wright of Catch-22 and Cl...

Traditional currencies now gain competition from trust-based systems enabled by the internet. According to Rachel Botsman, reputation capital is becoming so important that it will act as a secondar...

Just to promote sustainable city development leaders of Lodz (city in the Central Poland - http://en.uml.lodz.pl/) co-finance activities of non-governmental organizations via Social Innovation Fund...

This blogpost has been written by Lubomir Billy. Before I left Slovakia for my internship in the UK, my family and friends were asking me what I would do there. Learning, gaining contacts and infor...

A few weeks ago I attended TEDxCopenhagen, a one day conference emphasizing the spread of big visions and ideas. My favorite TED talk of the day was Hans Jørgen Wiberg’s talk on micro ...

This blogpost has been written by Lubomir Billy. While interning at The Young Foundation in London, I have learnt about many inspiring ideas and projects tackling various social problems. My chats ...

A busy few weeks for the Tepsie team means it is already a month since I attended the 5th International Social Innovation Research Conference, this year hosted at the Saïd Business School at t...

This blogpost was written by Witold Kwasnicki. A new Doctoral Research Scholarship Program, called PhD in "Shipyard” ("PhDo w Stoczni", in Polish) is a joint initiative of The ...

What is nudge and what does it have to do with social innovation? Much has been said about how Barack Obama harnessed the power of the social web in his ultimately successful bid for the White Hous...

This blogpost is written by Daniela Olejarova. In general, the concept of social innovation has not been recognized broadly in Slovakia. However, individual “social innovation islands” ...

Daniela Olejarova is an experienced social innovator from Slovakia, with a speciality in organizational and community development. She is currently in residence at The Young Foundation. We’ve...

Diffusion, understood as ‘the act of spreading something more widely’ is fundamentally about processes of change. It is unsurprising therefore that it is the subject of intense interest...

Measuring what matters?! – Blueprint for Social Innovation Metrics presented at EMES 2013 conference This year’s EMES conference lent its headline from Dennis Young’s seminal book...

How does a not-for-profit organisation or NGO go about working innovatively, and find new solutions to complex social problems? Although cases of innovative projects are all around us, these anecdo...

Social Innovation Camp (http://sicamp.org/) is an institution allowing for cooperation of ‘software developers and those with an understanding of a social problem to help them start and grow ...

The second Eastern Europe Initiatives Congress (EEIC) will be held in Lublin (Poland), 1-6 October 2013. EEIC is a meeting of the representatives of local governments, central governments, non-gove...

The need for more sustainability and responsible conduct in the finance and banking sector has moved into the focus of attention only in the last few years – not just in the aftermath of the ...

The Commission in their effort to enhance the visibility of successful Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) activities and to disseminate good practices, launched the European CSR Award Scheme for...

The «Social Innovation Relay» competition is the largest global educational initiative. This worldwide, interactive, web-based competition challenges young students, ages 15 through 19,...

“Just say yes” was the motto of the congress we attended the previous month in the UK city of Culture for 2013 Derry/ Londonderry. A really interesting and inspirational conference orga...

Since 2009 Greece has experienced a severe financial recession and the government has adopted austerity measures that have had a severe impact on the lives of citizens. At the same time, we are see...

The European Union has recognised social innovations as an important way of tackling social challenges and obstacles. Yet, there are several steps that have to be taken to get a resilient, internat...

As a team focused on social innovation research, it’s helpful to be reminded once in a while that innovation is not something we should pursue as an end in itself. Or as one colleague put it ...

On December 10th 2012 the first Roundtable on “Investing in Social Entrepreneurship” took place in Hamburg. The roundtable was organized by iq consult in cooperation with BBO Wirtschaft...

In this short paper we outline our working definition of social innovation. This definition was developed as part of the TEPSIE programme. It is very much a working definition and we welcome commen...

Much has been written about social innovation on the one hand and social investment on the other. Nevertheless, when we want to say something meaningful about generating capital flows for social in...

On December 14, 2012, the Greek Ministry of Labour, Social Security and Welfare organised in Thessaloniki, Greece an awareness raising forum on social entrepreneurship in which a lot of stakeholder...

What’s the link between social innovation and shared value and is shared value a useful concept for social innovators? For most of the 20th Century, political debate hinged on the opposition ...

What is the role of the social partners in social innovation? That is one of the questions that was raised in this morning’s workshop on social innovation hosted by Eurofound. Eurofound have ...

I’ve just got back from an interesting workshop on “Measuring the Value of Social Innovation” hosted by the Work Foundation, an independent research centre which explores issues a...

The University of Bologna recently hosted an international workshop on social innovation bringing together academics, policy makers, entrepreneurs and students. The Young Foundation presented its w...

Crowdfunding has emerged in recent years as an increasingly important source of grants and investment for new ventures. It involves using online platforms to pitch a proposed project to an online a...

Today, a new Social Innovation Competition was launched by the European Commission in memory of Diogo Vasconcelos. The competition was announced by President José Manuel Durão Barroso...