A (Very Informal) Who’s Who of Social Innovation in Canada Note: This article is the second of three blog posts originally published on Challenge Your World and cross-posted on SocialFinance.ca. In this blog series for Challenge Your World, Peter Deitz examines the current state of social innovation in Canada — what it is, who’s doing it, and how it might be measured. All comments welcome. Second only to tightrope walkers, social innovators are people who often have to block out the world around them in order to get from point A to point B. The process of creating a successful social enterprise requires nothing less than total concentration, often at the expense of getting to know one’s peers and following their progress. This blog post is an effort to reverse the trend by crowd-sourcing a directory of individuals and organizations who make up Canada’s social innovation sector. Please use the comments section below to highlight three or more people on this (very informal) Who’s Who of Social Innovation in Canada. Follow Adam Spence on Twitter
Research & Publications | Social Innovation Generation Report from Ola Tjornbo Early this fall, the community of researchers at the Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience (WISIR) met to design a research strategy to pursue in the near term. The core goal of the institute remains to generate new inter-disciplinary knowledge about social innovations and the social innovation process (the dynamics of learning, adaptation and resilience) in Canada and internationally. Frances Westley The Stanford Social Innovation Review, which is known for informing and inspiring leaders of social change, has published Frances Westley's article entitled "Social Innovation and Resilience: How One Enhances the Other" Read the full article here On the desks of our researchers Frances Westley, Sean Geobey, Kirsten Robinson In this paper we propose the creation of a Social Innovation Change Lab, what such a permanent process would entail and what it would aim to achieve. Sean Geobey, Frances Westley, Olaf Weber Frances Westley, Nino Antadze, Darcy J.
Social Innovation Generation (SiG) Design and Social Enterprise: A New Model for Case Studies Case studies form an integral part of management school curriculum. Pioneered in the 1920s by Harvard Business School, case studies encourage students to focus on the problems facing an organization at a particular moment in time and to use various analytic tools to propose solutions. Until recently, most business case studies have followed the format pioneered by Harvard. Cases tend to be written narratives of 5,000 to 10,000 words describing the problem as experienced by a manager along with a number of exhibits of generally numerical data appended to the narrative. There are tens of thousands of published cases on a diverse set of topics and organizations, including a core group of “bestsellers” that have been found to be particularly good for instruction. In 2006 the Yale School of Management (SOM) began producing its own series of case studies, based on the idea that existing case studies were tailored to fit a particular discipline. Design & Social Enterprise Case Series
Desis Lab » Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability Research Lab School of Design Strategies. Parsons The New School for Design Vision DESIS Lab members explore the relationship between design and social change. Our goal is to advance the practice and discourse of design-led social innovation to foster more equitable and sustainable cities and practices. In a complex world facing numerous systemic challenges, DESIS Lab members rethink assumptions about cultural and economic environments, bringing nuanced approaches drawn from integrated design practices to communities of all kinds. In the DESIS Lab, service design is considered an advanced approach, one integrating many design disciplines. Foundations Three foundations guide our research in design strategies: Bridging structural holes: Social settings often suffer from severe information asymmetries. Local and Global The lab works with local partners in New York City and with global partners through the DESIS Network, participating in large-scale research programs and projects to effect social change. Visit the DESIS Network website for more information.
Amplify: Creative and Sustainable Lifestyles on the Lower East Side – on view through 9/15 Are we growing more than plants? This question — blown up in large pink letters on a white wall in a small gallery on the Lower East Side — frames the core of the Amplify exhibition. Like the Lower East Side, the exhibition, which is the product of over one year of planning, research and design, is undergoing a process of evolution and reinvention. The larger initiative, Amplifying Creative Communities , pioneered by the Design for Sustainability and Social Innovation (DESIS) Lab at Parsons The New School for Design, represents the first stage of a multi-year project made possible, in part, by the Cultural Innovation Fund of the Rockefeller Foundation . As one of the installation’s curators, Lara Penin, an Assistant Professor in the Design and Management department at Parsons, describes it, “The exhibition is a research process, a process of interaction in which the content can change before, during and after the exhibit.” Photo: Eduardo Staszowski
Using Facebook to Fight Dangerous Driving in Delhi Dangerous Delhi drivers are now under the watchful eye of Facebook's "digital informants." Photo by Mani Babbar. With just 5,000 traffic officers in a city of 12 million people, Delhi Traffic Police are enlisting the help of Facebook to crack down on traffic violations, as reported in The New York Times today. The DTP created a Facebook page a couple of months ago to help manage traffic safety and congestion — especially important for Delhi, which is gearing up for the Commonwealth Games. With more than 17,800 fans and close to 3,000 photographs (plus nearly 50 videos), the Facebook page is an example of how online tools can be used to help improve transportation in cities around the world. By examining license plate numbers from user-submitted photographs, the DTP have issued 665 tickets, according to the city’s joint commissioner of traffic, Satyendra Garg. “Traffic police can’t be present everywhere, but rules are always being broken,” he said.
How to Briefly Describe Amazing Things: A Recap of 30 Days of SRSI Posted by Justin on Friday, July 23, 2010 · Leave a Comment We’ve been really lucky. For a couple of years now, we’ve been able to do the work that we’ve wanted to do, make the kinds of changes that we want to see, and create a set of projects that have kept us interested in staying in Windsor. The Storefront Residencies for Social Innovation wrapped up a couple weeks ago. For 30 days, we were very, very lucky. From June 11th to July 11th, we saw projects that redefined the idea of what BIAs could do, generated new models for micro-economies by exchanging food for stories, unravelled and reassembled long lost sweaters, and introduced an unprecedented level of investigation into the personal histories found in homes (and gardens) across the city. Installations lit up and animated storefronts, interrupted the social experience of public spaces, and imagined the collapse of municipalities generated a new way to look at materials and architecture.
Listen to the City: an Overview Posted by Justin on Tuesday, August 24, 2010 · 3 Comments Back in January, we asked nearly 40 people two questions: Why did you first come to Windsor? and Why are you still here? We asked those questions at an event called, Listen to the City, which was the first part of the five-month long project, Save the City. It was an incredible night. The answers we got over the hour and a half we spent together at Phog Lounge in downtown Windsor presented not just answers to those two questions, but sprawling conversations about what it means to live in Windsor, how we’ve shaped this city, and how it’s shaped us. The five-minute edit you can listen to below is just a slice of everything that was talked about that night. There were many voices that we unfortunately couldn’t include in the edit below, but only because of the amazing conversations those folks had, which in turn didn’t offer the kind of brief samples similar to those that we cut together.
An Imaginary Platform: 2010 Municipal Elections in Windsor Posted by Justin on Monday, August 2, 2010 · 3 Comments We’ve updated our imaginary campaign post to reflect some recent (positive) changes: Our projects try to work around the realities that we encounter in Windsor on a daily basis. We address these realities creatively, and so the ways in which we address them don’t always translate to solutions. We usually try to suggest the change we’d like to see, albeit on a small scale. So, in continuing with this work, we offer the following: We’re little less than 3 months away from the 2010 municipal elections here in Windsor. It’s essentially a given that we’ll have the same mayor for a third term (or maybe not?) In hopes of imaging a greater city, we’d like to propose the following platform. If you’re running for council, please steal these ideas.
About the EVOKE game Posted by Alchemy on 27 Jan under Behind the scenes EVOKE is a ten-week crash course in changing the world. It is free to play and open to anyone, anywhere. The goal of the social network game is to help empower people all over the world to come up with creative solutions to our most urgent social problems. The game’s first season began on March 3, 2010 and ended on May 12th, 2010. About Season One On May 12th, 2010 the first season of the game ended, and successful participants formed the first graduating class of the EVOKE network. Some top players also earned online mentorships with experienced social innovators and business leaders from around the world, seed funding for new ventures, and travel scholarships to share their vision for the future at the EVOKE Summit in Washington DC. EVOKE was developed by the World Bank Institute, the learning and knowledge arm of the World Bank Group, and directed by alternate reality game master Jane McGonigal. Press inquiries: Contact evokenet@gmail.com