Social Innovation and the SDG 2030 Agenda

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En provenance du cours de Yonsei University

Sustainable Development in the 21st Century with Ban Ki-moon

27 notes

Yonsei University

Sustainable Development in the 21st Century with Ban Ki-moon

27 notes

The course is designed for people that want to learn about the latest development agenda the international community agreed to achieve by 2030. Structured around the five pillars of Agenda 2030 – people, prosperity, planet, peace and justice, and partnership, students will learn that these pillars are interconnected and need to be integrated in practical policy-making and operational activities for development, in both developed and developing country settings. Following an introductory module on the main concepts of Agenda 2030 and the SDGs, successive modules will provide the foundation behind the SDGs for people, prosperity and planet, peace and partnership. A final module will explore the way forward and provide channels that the young generation can participate to integrate the SDGs in the policy-making of the students’ resident countries. To get a better idea of our course, we welcome you to take a look at our promotional video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KATSb73TeB4

À partir de la leçon

Prosperity

Where the last module focused on the activities within the 2030 Agenda to tackle the problems related to the Planet, this week will focus on the prosperity element of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. Economic development is a key component in any development agenda. You will be analyzing the past trends of economic and political development and will be introduced to examples of how to achieve sustainable economic development. We will touch upon concepts of sustainable economic trends such as social innovation and green jobs, buildings and energy sources.

Social Innovation and the SDG 2030 Agenda5:36

Social Innovation and Sustainable Development5:15

Social Innovation and Collective Impact5:24

Rencontrer les enseignants

Ban Ki-moon
Distinguished Chair Professor
Institute for Global Engagement and Empowerment

Social innovation, broader defined,

may be viewed as new approaches to solving social and environmental problems.

When we consider ambitious challenges,

like the SDG 2030 Agenda,

it's clear that we need new strategies and technologies to achieve our collective goals.

Now, many pundits note that we have entered

a new age of unprecedented technological changes.

As Klaus Schwab observes in the Fourth Industrial Revolution,

"Of the many diverse and fascinating challenges that we face today,

the most intense and important is how to

understand and shape the new technology revolution,

which entails nothing less than a transformation of humankind."

Now, technological developments like artificial intelligence, blockchain, IoT,

open source software, and a host of

new biomedical discoveries are rapidly redefining notion of what is possible today.

In a sense, technological innovations can have

far greater impact because of the network effect,

where the value of a product or service increases as more people use them.

Only a small number of people used a telephone when it first was invented,

which greater limited its value.

However, when nearly every household of

a nation becomes connected to a telephone network,

its value increases exponentially.

Today's global interconnectivity greatly accelerates

the proliferation of new technologies and magnifies their potential impact.

While it may have taken several decades in the past to adopt new technologies,

it can now just take a few years for them to spread.

These rapid technological innovations offer a host of new opportunities,

as well as challenges,

both at the local and global levels.

Entire industries may disappear as AI

increasingly assumes tasks that humans once performed.

And the scale of global environmental problems like

climate change can far exceed anything we have ever known before.

Thus, there must be a heightened awareness and engagement with

technological changes so that we can

utilize these gains to improve our collective prosperity.

However, simply having new technologies

available will not automatically lead to significant changes.

Individuals who desire to find innovative and creative solutions to

our social environmental problems must acquire new technological skill sets,

but they must also keep in mind the importance of sustainability.

We have come a long way in terms of improving global economic development and well-being.

But we can also ask the question,

why more has not been done in the past,

and why so many solutions had not been more sustainable?

Here, we come to a key aspect of social innovation,

which is the importance of reimagining the goals and purposes of organizations.

Social innovation often emerges through companies that seek more than

pure profits or when nonprofit foundations find more secure funding models.

In other words, social innovation can be achieved through

hybrid organizations that combine aspects of

nonprofits and for-profits to achieve social impact.

Therefore, an important aspect of social innovation is

to discover new organizational models that have social concerns,

but also have sustainable revenue generation.

Now ultimately, social innovation may be

defined as pioneering new methods of solving social problems,

particularly in the areas of social impact investing,

social entrepreneurship, and nonprofit leadership.

In other words, social innovation can emerge when

for-profit corporations change their mission statements to prioritize social values,

when investment funds seek

social and environmental gains through their selective investments,

and when nonprofit foundations maintain

a stronger focus on sustainable revenues to maximize their potential social impact.

One of the most exciting sectors of social innovation today are a group of

social entrepreneurship startup companies that have

sustainable business models and apply emerging technologies to achieve social impact.

The social entrepreneurship companies attempt to tackle problems from scratch to

develop approaches that might be difficult to

implement in more established organizations.

The commonality that can be found in

all these social innovation approaches is a desire to

find new organizational models to achieve social impact.

The field of social innovation is diverse and there is no agreed upon definition.

However, what remains clear is that we need

bolder and more ambitious efforts to achieve the SDG 2030 Agenda.

And we can look for novel solutions among

the various practitioners of social innovation around the world.

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