Social Innovation on the Internet: The Organisation and Participant Equation
I’m looking forward to participating next week in the Social Innovation workshop at the CCI SYMPOSIUM: The Big Picture: Socio-Cultural Research and Australia’s Policy Challenges in Brisbane. The following is my position paper:
Social innovation, largely a nebulous concept, refers to the “the development and implementation of new ideas (products, services and models) to meet social needs” (Mulgan et al. 2007). Literature in this field is heavily devoted to describing conditions in which social innovation can succeed across multiple sectors of the economy, with the implication that social innovation can be successfully ‘orchestrated’ by governments and organisations. Perspectives on social innovation can be simplistically divided into a ‘top-down’ approach, where governments can implement large-scale change through direct investment or a more ‘bottom up’ process based on the incremental collaboration of many people across organisations (Hetherington 2008).
In this paper I take the view that social innovation successfully occurs when there is a strong organisational framework to support innovation at the participant level. Further, I focus on the Internet as a technology that has demonstrated its potential to meet social needs effectively. An evaluation of The One Economy Digital Communities program in San Jose, California, found that low-income families used the Internet for a range of ‘meaningful’ activities’ in their lives, with a positive effect on “schoolwork, job performance, health care, and feelings of connectedness to others and their communities” (Michalchik et al. 2006).
It should be highlighted that the many websites and applications on the Internet that help users achieve social outcomes have organisations behind them with particular goals and responsibilities to stakeholders, and importantly require sound funding models to survive. Both organisational robustness and high end-user engagement are features of successful online properties that have demonstrated ‘social innovation’.
Networking a key element of social innovation
The prevalence of social innovation in recent times has been attributed partly to technology, in particular “the spread of networks and global infrastructures for information and social networking tools”. (Murray et al. 2011). My current research relates to this theme by examining the sharing of quality information on ‘networked personal media’ to meet the social needs of participants. Networked personal media can be understood as online content produced and consumed by individual users that has relevancy to a fluid set of the users’ connections. The quality of the information, while subjective, can be determined by the user once it has successfully met an identified social need.
Networked personal media platforms (more commonly referred to as ‘social media’) including Facebook and Twitter, provide an environment for users to receive peer-validated information on-demand, that previously, they would not be able to access as quickly. They can also exploit new networks through third-party connections that previously were not visible to them. One consultant from London I met recently had managed to switch careers from nursing to social media through ‘following’ and engaging with the owners of a start-up in Kuala Lumpur on Twitter. Thanks to the exposure of a ‘weak’ social link, she was able to achieve both geographical and career mobility. The real social relationships that can be formed or strengthened on networked personal media highlight the cultural and value-based drivers of social innovation (Murray et al. 2011).
Australian online examples of social innovation
RedBubble
RedBubble is an online art community started in Melbourne in 2007, featuring wall art, design, photography and t-shirts by artists worldwide. RedBubble is characterised by four features of successful social innovation, namely: (1) Focus on a specific unmet social need; (2) Creative matching of assets and capabilities; (3) Iterative development; and (4) Adaptive organisational forms (Hetherington 2008).
RedBubble is a for-profit enterprise, but it meets a social need in connecting and promoting artists outside the traditional gallery network; and potentially facilitates an income for a group in the community that is often financially disadvantaged (unmet social need). RedBubble is more than a traditional retailer, acting as a “conduit for a community of artists”.
The core strength of RedBubble is that it leverages an online social networking platform to share compelling content. While the website owners provide the infrastructure behind merchandising and distributing the work (creative matching), as well as the roll-out of tools for sharing and collaborating (iterative development) the etiquette and changing culture of the network is defined by its users (adaptive organisational form). Based on venture capital raised by its founders, including Martin Hosking of LookSmart fame, the investment in RedBubble appears to be paying off with reported revenues of AUD $3.32 million.
OurPatch
OurPatch, founded in NSW in 2008 is an online business directory that was created to provide a service for regional and rural towns that were being ‘neglected’ by commercial publishers. The founders saw a need to help small businesses migrate online, addressing a potential problem of ‘social inclusion’ for regional Australia. The Australian Government defines a socially inclusive society as “one in which all Australians feel valued and the opportunity to participate fully in the life of our society” (Australian Inclusion Board 2011). Tackling disadvantage through a location-based approach is a key element of the Australian Government’s Social Inclusion Agenda.
Co-founder, Simon van Wyk says that OurPatch “enables remote communities to promote or source whatever they so choose” which could mean anything from events, local news to buying and selling items. The website supports business and community groups by allowing participants to optimise their geographical networks in an online environment. There is a strong management team behind OurPatch, which employs six staff. OurPatch attracted revenue of $695,000 in the 2010 financial year and was named as one of Australia’s top 50 fastest-growing start-ups in 20115.
Can social innovation succeed online without an organisational framework?
In this paper I have cited two examples of organisations whose online platforms create wide social value. The websites are designed by the organisations to meet a specific social need as well as fulfil the financial objectives of the organisation. There is an implied social use in the structure of the websites, but the success of the site depends on the users themselves. This paper has not provided examples of where users have created social value for themselves without organisational direction on large-scale social media platforms. While I pointed to one anecdote about a consultant changing locations and career through the benefit of networked personal media, more research is required to assess if this is happening across wider sectors of society, particularly disadvantaged socio-economic groups.
References
Australian Inclusion Board, 2011. Governance Models for Location Based Initiatives, Australian Inclusion Board.
Hetherington, D., 2008. Case Studies in Social Innovation: A Background Paper, Per Capita.
Michalchik, V. et al., 2006. One Economy Digital Communities: Transforming Lives for Low-Income Americans in San Jose and Miami, Center for Technology in Learning.
Mulgan, G. et al., 2007. In and out of sync: The challenge of growing social innovations, London: NESTA.
Murray, R., Mulgan, G. & Caulier-Grice, J., 2011. Generating Social Innovation: setting an agenda, shaping methods and growing the field.
Maybe http://storify.com/ is heading in this direction. I haven’t got an invite yet but it seems to allow weaving of links and tweets etc. into stories.
Also, I am still struck by the lack of a decent RSS personal aggregator on the web (I have tried a few). Best would be one that is like the meme aggregator in FeedDemon but web-based and able to pull my latest feed list from Google Reader – that would be just perfect.