Ideas, approaches & solutions that inform our work…
How do we know we’re getting results? We take measurement pretty seriously – which is why we don’t always measure everything stakeholders want to know in the way they want to know it. As July’s edition of Wired shows, measurement can shape behaviour.
The past three weeks have been packed with meeting new people and learning new things – at the Global Service Jam, the Reos Partners Learning Festival, and even our own InWithFor retreat in Clayton Bay. Here’s what I’ve made of it all…
How does context shape social innovation? The LIFE programme is a new approach to family crisis in the UK, much as Family by Family is a new approach to preventing family crisis in Australia. There’s lots to learn from each other.
I left summer school with some new friends, some new ideas, and some new questions: When is incremental innovation warranted – and when does it actually make it harder for radical transformation?
Three new-ish publications argue that we should fund public services and social programs based on outcomes, not outputs. We agree, but look at the missing link between outcomes and outputs: people’s behavior.
Innovation spawns innovation. So it is with South Australia’s cool Thinkers In Residence Programme. We wonder aloud what a Thinker and Doer Residence Programme would look like.
Now that we’re finally getting to work in South Australia with The Australian Centre for Social Innovation, people want to know what we do. Finding a job title that can fit on a business card is hard enough, let alone figuring out how to frame social innovation: is it about problems, methods, solutions, or all three? The Young Foundation’s ‘The Open Book of Social Innovation’ offers one starting point.
The co-design, co-production, co-creation, co-delivery space can get a little co-nfusing, especially as the terms are often used as if interchangeable. In The Challenge of Co-production Nesta’s Lab and The New Economics Foundation explain for us what co-production is and isn’t.
Roger Martin’s book ‘The Design Of Business’ provides a useful model for understanding innovation and has a description of Design Thinking that holds water. One of the few design theory books that’s worth more than you’ll get for it at the second hand bookseller.
Real design thinking, as opposed to the new & trendy design thinking, starts with the premise that social problems are wicked: they can never be fully defined or solved; only re-solved with solutions that are inseparable from our values and judgments.
Is feeling connected, valued and a part of something much bigger than ourselves the key to a good, happy life?
We use logic models from the start to end of projects to help us understand and shape how social change happens.
Social entrepreneurship, social innovation, and public sector reform oh my! What do these words really tell us?
Can the naming of a problem in one culture change how that problem is experienced in another culture? What does this mean for those of us who work on social innovation across cultures?
Three Cups of Tea tells Greg Mortenson’s story: a social entrepreneur who has built over 40 schools in rural Afghan and Pakistani villages. Mortenson’s work seems out of sequence: school buildings first, educational content later. Or is it that certain contexts, like Afghanistan and Pakistan, require us to prioritize access above all else?
People in Latin countries are happier than their Western counterparts, in part, because of strong social relationships. We should look at the quality of relationships as a key policy outcome, and not just the existence of relationships, be it to an employer or spouse.
Teaching new facts should not be the focus of adult education. Instead, continued brain development and a richer form of learning may require that you “bump up against people and ideas” that are different.
US healthcare reform bill takes a piloting approach to cutting costs.
New series on design and social innovation on GOOD, written by frog design.
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