This document discusses social innovation in Poland and identifies several obstacles and opportunities. Some of the key obstacles identified are a low level of social capital, a culture of individualism over collaboration, weak evidence-based policymaking, and a lack of funding and institutional support for social innovations. However, there are also some hopes, like a new strategy to develop social capital, a new Ministry of Administration and Digitalization, and the potential of a new "Unit for Research and Social Innovation" to help foster social innovations through educational programs, data resources, and citizen participation initiatives.

1. Social innovations in Poland
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Kuba.wygnanski@gmail.com

2. Innovation in Europe + USA + Japan
Źródło: Pro Inno Europe. 2011. Innovation Union Scoreboard 2010. The Innovation Union's performance scoreboard for Research and Innovation. Brussels: European
Commission.

3. Social Innovations
• What is social innovation?
– By the peolpe
– For the people
– With the people
• Searching for something in the midlle of
„catch all” and „elitis approach”.
• Gdynia meeting and its possible formative role

4. Obstacles for social innovations in Poland
• Low level of social capital (particularly - “linking” dimension)
• High level of individualism - smart educated people not translated to
smart institutions
• State “bulimia” + regulatory approach to public policy, adversarial
concept of state and civil society
• Lack of evidence base policy
• Market proselytism – deep believe that competition is the main source of
innovation and optimal configuration of needs and solutions
• Innovation subordinated to institutional domains of academia and
enterprises - not so much to governance and social processes
• Weak meta competences – for example “how to learn on own
mistakes”, “how to learn from others”

5. • Lack of proper "distillations" of good practices – problem of
self-selection of innovation - lack of proper validation / fake
evaluations
• Lack of scaling and convergence mechanism for good
practices
• Lack of institutional space for social innovation – incubators,
hubs, centers for excellence etc.
• Patenting, patenting, patenting – lack of culture of „open
code”
• Outgrown technical infrastructures of information and
training (ESF type)
• Not enough „structural holes” – bridging sectors, industries
and groups

6. Funding for social innovations
Problems with public funding
– Lack of acceptance for risk
– Too big chunks
– Irrelevant assessment process
– Lack of validation
– Poor mainstreaming of products
– ESF solution or problem
Para banking institutions
Weak private funding (traditional model philanthropy and mostly
shallow and instrumental practices of CSR)
•

7. Institutional backbone
• Technology clusters
• Private sector
• Academia
• NGOs
• Public administration
• EU „generated” public infrastrucure

8. Hopes
• Strategy of development of social and creative
capital
• New Ministry of Administration and
Digitalization (last week)
• Necessity of respond to the crisis -> sclerosis
or innovation

9. Unit for Research and Social Innovatioan
SHIPYARD
• „Social Bauhaus”
• Educational institution
• PhD -> PhDo
• Examples
– Civic Foresight
– Civic City Warsaw (historical map of civic activism since XIX
century in Warsaw)
– Public Participation Laboratory
– ICT in Local Communities
– High Resoilutioin Da ta Repository for Local Communities
(mojapolis.pl)
– ICT – in Local Communities (eg. Naprawmyto.pl)
– Advanced on-going evaluations ( eg. Invisble Children)
– Reserch and impelementation of city wide voluntter corps