Conferencia en el marco de los Seminarios Internacionales del Master en Estrategias y Tecnologías para el Desarrollo, impartida por Gorka Espiau el 14 de diciembre de 2017.

1. Plataformas de Innovación Social
Madrid ItdUPM. 14/12/2017
@GEspiau

2. The context for social innovation
Intractable social problems
The classic tools of government policy on the one hand, and market solutions on the other, have proved grossly inadequate to solve social problems. The market, by itself, lacks the
incentives and appropriate models to solve many of these issues. Where there are market failures (due to non-competitive markets, externalities or public goods), these tasks have
fallen either to the state or civil society. However, current policies and structures of government have tended to reinforce old rather than new models. The silos of government
departments are poorly suited to tackling complex problems which cut across sectors and nation states. Traditional approaches understand that “Civil society lacks the capital, skills
and resources to take promising ideas to scale”.
Rising costs
The prospective cost of dealing with these issues threatens to swamp public budgets. As in climate change, pollution control, waste reduction, poverty and welfare programmes, the
most effective policies are preventative. But effective prevention has been notoriously difficult to introduce, in spite of its apparent economic and social benefits.
Old paradigms
As during earlier technological and social transformations, there is a disjunction between existing structures and institutions and what’s needed now. This is as true for the private as
for the social economy. New paradigms tend to flourish in areas where the institutions are most open to them, and where the forces of the old are weak. So, for example, there is
more innovation around self-management of diseases and public health than around hospitals; more innovation around recycling and energy efficiency than around large scale
energy production; more innovation around public participation than in parliaments and assemblies; and more innovation around active ageing than around pension provision.

3. Beyond the smart city
Urban territories are facing tremendous challenges in being able to offer socially sustainable environments. Technology is not the only solution when cities in particular
are becoming the natural ecosystem for inequality. (MIT Technology Review).
The wealthiest, the “squeezed middle” and the growing poorest couldn’t live physically closer to each other.
Whilst there are huge amounts of innovative and creative work within urban areas, many of society’s most complex problems also manifest themselves here –
unemployment, poverty, pollution and social mobility to name but a few.

4. Complex system approach
The consequences of inequality in urban contexts, often described as ‘wicked’ problems for their complex, entrenched, and interconnected nature are too often
addressed in a short-term or fragmented way. Even the most successful interventions always acknowledged that the challenges we are tackling are too complex
and interrelated to be transformed applying a technical “project delivery” mentality.
‘The more demanding the innovation challenges like poverty, ill health or environmental damage, the greater becomes the importance of effective policy. This is
not a question of “picking winners”. Instead, it is about engaging widely across society, in order to build the most fruitful conditions for deciding what “winning”
even means’. Stirling (2014)

5. Incremental V. disruptive innovation
INCREMENTAL
Incremental social innovation operates within existing frameworks in order to deliver
new solutions to address ‘market failures’
STRUCTURAL
Structural social innovation reconfigures markets, structures, institutions or
organisations in the process of innovating
DISRUPTIVE
Disruptive social innovation provides entirely new models for organising markets
and/or social interactions. Instead of operating within or adapting existing models it
creates entirely new ones which come to change our frameworks of understanding.

6. Urban social innovation
Many city leaders share the aspiration of generating socially sustainable ecosystems with the potential to incubate disruptive innovations that will tackle the
structural causes of inequality. Social Innovation and Social entrepreneurship are the new “buzz words” but most of the time we are renaming existing fields. Are
we looking for incremental or disruptive innovation?

7. An entrepreneurial city
“A City/Region/State is entrepreneurial when it is able and willing to invest in areas of extreme uncertainty, courageously envisioning the direction of change across
public agencies and departments.
An entrepreneurial City/Region/State must welcome, rather than fear, the high risk and uncertainty across the entire innovation chain (from basic research to
commercialization) and the experimentation processes required for organisational learning along the way (Hirschman, 1967; Rodrik, 2013). Most importantly, an
entrepreneurial state must ‘think big.”
“Beyond Market Failures: shaping and creating the digital market”. Mariana Mazzucato 2014

8. New tools
More interconnected and larger scale interventions need to be co-created until a genuine movement of transformation is generated at the city/region level. Projects
need to be incorporated as necessary tools of the “transformation movement” but always integrated within a deeper aspirational goal.
These city movements can only be co-created generating a new narrative of transformation capable of connecting the identity of the territory with a “collective
decision” to build a socially sustainable city, proud to be associated with, proud to be living in.

9. Culture and Identity building
Identity building is therefore an evolving process that can be positively or negatively channelled through collective action. Those cities and territories who have been able
to associate themselves with a positive narrative of transformation are more resilient and socially sustainable, even more competitive.
Projects need to be incorporated as necessary tools of the “transformation movement” but always integrated within a deeper aspirational goal.

10. 10
Strategic projects, policies and decisions can be described as Innovation Hardware, but local culture provides the necessary Transformation Software.
Culture is understood as the set of values, principles and narratives that inform and condition the strategic decisions and projects that makes city transformation possible. Projects, policies and
decisions can be replicated but they will never work if they are not intrinsically connected, inspired by and responding to the demands of the local culture and identity.
City hardware is, therefore, useless without the proper social innovation software.
Social Innovation Software and Hardware

12. Transaccional Vs. Relacional

13. Gorka Espiau. J. W. McConnell Professor of Practice at CIRM/CRIEM. McGill University.

14. Gorka Espiau. J. W. McConnell Professor of Practice at CIRM/CRIEM. McGill University.

15. Gorka Espiau. J. W. McConnell Professor of Practice at CIRM/CRIEM. McGill University.

16. El Caso Vasco
Challenging the
current innovation
paradigm
Gorka Espiau. J. W. McConnell Professor of Practice at CIRM/CRIEM. McGill University.

17. Social Permission to Innovate
In some communities, even when people try to make change happen or to socially innovate, it is not recognised by others as a valid action, or is not given
‘permission to act’. People perceive they cannot do things because people like them are not responsible. They are acting to make change happen all the
time but it isn’t recognised.
But we have also documented that in different contexts communities – individuals or people – have not always gone along with this idea that they
shouldn’t act or cannot help themselves. One way in which communities engage with inequality narratives is by actively countering them. They tell a
different story, share a different vision, and ascribe different meaning to the same facts. We call these counter-narratives. Counter narratives emerge
independently of the dominant narrative and in spite of it. They draw on community knowledge and community-centric values.
In certain situations, people can generate the permission to act for themselves, through social means: self-belief, acting on shared values, and by
supporting each other. They can tell themselves that they and others can do something .They don’t need specific skills or authority. They just need an
attitude to be willing to help make change happen.
This gives them the ‘social permission to act’. It is based and driven by shared values and actions. The success of community-led innovation is that it is
social and community-based. People take actions and are supported by the community, who often join them because they trust them and believe in their
ideas. (Hodgson 2016)

18. Building the commons

20. DRAFT – Confidential. Do Not Distribute.
Amplifier Montreal Innovation Platform
2.- Co-creation
Percolab
MIS
Amplifier Mtl
Projects
Intermediary
Intermediary
4.-Amplifier-X Fund
Investment$
Ethnography + Exeko(inclusion) + Grand Tournée
+ Other participatory research methods
Community actions
Small and Medium size
innovation projects
Large Scale initiatives
(Enfants)
Mapping of listening initiatives
3.-Acceleration
1.- Listening Platform/ Montreal Observatory
Policy actions

21. Montreal Innovation Platform

22. A mplify
Northern Ireland
1-5pm Monday 22 June
Ulster Museum
24 Innovations
9 stories of a better NI
One movement for change
4 Hours
“If wechangethestory wetell ourselvesthen
it leaveseverything open to possibilities”
Charity worker, Derry-Londonderry
BO O K YO UR FREE PLACE BY 14 JUNE AT www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/170 548 0 0 3 6 7
www.facebook.com/groups/amplifyni
@AmplifyNI

23. @GEspiau