What is Social Innovation?

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From the course by University of Cape Town

Becoming a changemaker: Introduction to Social Innovation

224 ratings

University of Cape Town

Becoming a changemaker: Introduction to Social Innovation

224 ratings

This free 6 week course is for anyone who wants to make a difference. Whether you are already familiar with the field of social innovation or social entrepreneurship, working for an organization that wants to increase its social impact, or just starting out, this course will take you on a journey of exploring the complex problems that surround us and how to start thinking about solutions. We will debunk common assumptions around what resources are needed to begin acting as a social innovator. We will learn from the numerous examples of social innovations happening all over the world. You will be challenged to get out of your comfort zone and start engaging with the diverse spaces around you. By the end of the course, you will have formed your own approach to social innovation, and you will have begun to develop the concepts, mindset, skills, and relationships that will enable you to start and evolve as a changemaker. You will be able to purchase a Verified Certificate if you wish to show evidence of your achievements, but this is optional, and you may apply for Financial Aid if you are unable to pay the certificate fee. The Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship co-created this course with RLabs, a social movement ‘born-and-bred’ in Bridgetown, Cape Town that is now active in 22 countries. The movement empowers youth through innovative and disruptive technology by teaching them vital skills and providing much needed support and a sense of community. Advocating and supporting initiatives such as RLabs forms part of the Bertha Centre’s mandate. The Centre is a specialised unit at University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business, and is the first academic centre in Africa dedicated to advancing social innovation and entrepreneurship. You can view the course trailer at www.youtube.com/watch?v=TcWYG64WO20 Tweet about this course using the hashtag #socinnMOOC

From the lesson

What's our problem?

Welcome to Becoming a changemaker! This week, we distinguish between simple, complicated and complex problems. Social innovation takes place in complex systems and complex systems have complex or “wicked” problems, like the kinds of problems the world is trying to tackle right now such as climate change, HIV Aids and other pandemics, poverty and inequality. A complex system has many variables or elements such as different sorts of people, material and rules and those elements of the system are interacting with each other so much that the complexity increases exponentially. So the work of complexity is about bringing yourself into the system, engaging with it, living with it and innovating in yourself as you innovate in that system that you’re working in. You can’t look at the whole system but you can look at more than one piece of it. The more you start to bring in different parts of the systems, you can then start to connect those in ways that they weren’t connected before.

RLabs: Journey of Hope Part 17:23

What is Social Innovation?4:39

Simple, complicated and complex6:03

Wicked problems4:54

Case study: Mothers2mothers8:35

Reflecting with RLabs: problems10:23

Meet the Instructors

François Bonnici
Director
Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town
Warren Nilsson
Associate Professor
Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town
Marlon Parker
Founder
RLabs

[MUSIC]

Social innovation would be coming up with an idea where you can sustain

in the community or somewhere where you can have a idea and

people can come and benefit from it.

Let's say looking at your community or

anywhere you stay and seeing some sort of a challenge.

And then going ahead and figuring out ways to overcome the challenge.

People living on the Cape Flats are innovative.

They have to be.

And they don't even realise how innovative they are because they have to

make do with so little.

And they get by in everyday life with the little that they have.

So social innovation is, it's an everyday thing on the Cape Flats.

It's just that it's a foreign term to people.

And people don't quite understand what it is.

It can be something that you can build from scratch.

It can be something that's already existing and you can go ahead and

make do something that's going to help solve that challenge.

And then being innovative and just thinking out of the box and

doing something out of the ordinary, or doing something ordinary.

It doesn't have to be extraordinary.

Taking old ideas that didn't work and making something of it.

Like identifying problems within our communities and

just doing it with a twist and solving problems within our communities.

That is what social innovation means to me.

In the early 2000s the entrepreneur and activist Paul Hawken decided to try

and count and catalog all of the social purpose organizations in the world.

And it was kind of a crazy idea and he never quite got to the end of it but

he did come to the astonishing conclusion that right now we're in the middle of

the largest social movement that the world has ever seen.

We don't recognise it as a movement because it doesn't look like movements of

the past, it doesn't have one visible charismatic leader that we identify with

the movement, it doesn't have an explicit ideology that people sign up for.

Instead it's made up by at least a million,

maybe many more organizations around the world all working to address social and

environmental challenges in their own way.

But, kind of brought together by a common set of shared values.

And these organizations might be non-profit organizations, they might be

businesses, they might government agencies, they might be networks.

They might be informal groupings in community, they might be hybrids of any or

all of the above.

Together though they make up quite a mass of social change energy, and I think

that's one of the reasons that this is an amazingly exciting time to be alive and

to engage in that world with those people and those organizations.

And that world is the world of social innovation.

So Warren and I have in this world of social innovation for several decades.

And now we're fortunate to find ourselves at the University of Cape Town and

in this country South Africa where we think we found one of the most amazing and

exciting social innovations the world have seen.

And that's RLabs.

You started your journey with our video in this first module.

And on the surface, RLabs look like your typical social service organization.

But once you go deeper under the surface, you start to see

all kinds of innovations that lead to much more transformative impact.

And we think RLabs offers a set of clues for all of us,

no matter what your position, where you find yourself,

what kind of context you're in, around how social innovation can be expressed.

This term, social innovation, was not really commonly used before the year 2000.

And now we start to see it in all sorts of places as you described.

So, what is social innovation?

It's a good question.

As you said, the term is really emerging and people are using it in different ways,

those were using it.

But, I think most of the definition start with the idea of a problem,

a social or environmental problem.

And a social innovation would be some kind of novel attempt to address this problem

that has a widespread benefit for many different kinds of people.

And problems is often where we start as humans.

We have an impulse to try and fix things.

So we wanted to start this journey with you

on understanding the nature of those problems.

How do we engage in them?

How do we understand them?

And in the world of social change, many of these problems are complex problems.

And that's where we're going to start.

[MUSIC]

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