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.
Ban Ki-moonDistinguished Chair Professor
