reflections on social innovation

This picture might look like a holiday snap but in fact it’s a photo of the seaside at San Sebastian. Mainly known as the place that has the highest number of Michelin-starred restaurants per capita, but for about 100 social innovators around the world, it will also be remembered as the location of a pretty intense conference on the state of social innovation globally. I was there too, and it’s taken me a week or so to process my thoughts on what I heard while I was there.

I’m sure it will inform lots of subsequent posts so here are just a couple of things that I’m wondering about now I’m back in the considerably greyer London. First, I was struck by the absence of politics, in both the big p and small p sense of the word, in the stories people told and the discussions we had. Social innovation at its most simple is about finding new ways of meeting currently unmet needs. Maybe that is ideologically neutral. But when you think about it as ‘innovating the social’ (as someone said on the final day), it is surely more of a politically loaded issue? Doesn’t it imply – or shouldn’t it – a particular vision of how society should be? I am worried that we lose something by making it a politics-free zone. Maybe this is partly bred by my discomfort at how easily the Tories have picked up social innovation as a core theme. Food for thought.

The other reflection I have is about whether social innovation is at all gendered. Robin Murray, probably the nearest thing you’ll find to a genial genius these days, used a slide that depicted four ’spheres’ of action, with his attempts to put a monetary value on each of them (will share these slides as soon as SIX upload them…). First, the state, valued at £540bn. Then the market at £11,600bn. Next the grant economy, at £31bn, and finally the biggest of them all, the household at £14,500bn. Seeing the value of the household like this was last attempted by feminists making the case to recognise the otherwise invisible work of women – caring, community, family work – and to value that as essential to society. Given the continued role of women in this sector, could social innovation be a key to unlocking a different narrative about gender?

A very unformed thought currently, but given the excitement women expressed when I started to road-test the idea of a global women’s network around these issues, I am clearly not alone in wondering about this.