What we've learnt about social innovation over the last three years...

What we’ve learnt about
social innovation
over the last
3 years
Christian-Paul Stenta

Wednesday, 5 December 12

TACSI:
A new kind of
organisation


We’re not a
government
agency


We work closely with government - but we’re not a government agency

We’re not an
academic
institution


We work closely with research - but we’re not an academic institution

We’re not a
service delivery
organisation


We incubate new solutions - but we’re not a service delivery organisation

Social
Community
services
Social
Social
innovation
change
laboratory
Policy Business


Laboratory which works across traditional boundaries between policy makers, social services,
business and the community to develop solutions that lead to measurable social change.

Interdisciplinary team
DESIGN SOCIAL SCIENCE COMMUNITY PRACTITIONER BUSINESS


We do this by creating teams with skills, knowledge and experiences that draw from a range
of differing disciplines. We work with social scientists, public servants, designers, business
analysts, community developers, management specialists and educators.


We’ve spent the last three years working on the ground in South Australia exploring ways to
create positive social change. We’ve explored many different issues. Some of these issues
include:

X


Taking pressure off an overburdened child protection system through the co-creation of
Family by Family as a new model of family support


Creating a cultural revolution to change our attitudes towards binge drinking by investing in
Hello Sunday Morning.


Taking a new model of urban regeneration which started in Newcastle, replicating the model
in Townsville and Adelaide, and now scaling the model through the development of a national
organisation which is building the capacity of cities to transform their neighbourhoods to
generate both social and economic outcomes

Care
Weavers Reflect


Exploring the implications of an ageing population and ways we can enable Great Living in
late adulthood, with a speciﬁc focus on improving outcomes for carers

Tjungu


And ﬁnally exploring Indigenous entrepreneurship in remote communities by investing in and
mentoring the development of sustainable cultural tourism in central Australia.

We’ve also explored different methods to generate and incubate innovation:

Bold Ideas Better Lives Challenge winners
facing our communities.

Aged Care Employment Pathways Renew Australia Tjungu: Tjungu:
Digital Lifestyles for Deaf Students Placing creative, social Learning Country
Learning Country
Engaging older people Creating access to and cultural initiatives Building community capacity
Building community capacit
with technology to employment for the in empty or disused and social entrepreneurship with
and social entrepreneurship
improve their quality hearing impaired buildings to re-engage indigenous communities across the
indigenous communities acr
of life in aged care through development people with underutilised Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunyjatjara
Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankun
facilities. of workplace tools, urban areas. lands in central Australia.
lands in central Australia.
technology and training.

AroundYou Hello Sunday Morning Sharing Universal Who Gives A Crap?™
Who Gives A Crap?™
Connecting people with Addressing Australia’s Stories of Depression Turning consumers intoconsumers into phila
Turning philanthropists
their local neighbourhood binge drinking culture Raising awareness – a social enterprise selling
– a social enterprise selling
and building community and encouraging of depression among environmentally sustainable t
environmentally sustainable toilet
through events, activities individuals to take culturally and
paper that will donatethatproﬁts to its proﬁ
paper
its will donate
and services online and in responsibility and change linguistically diverse support environmental conse
support environmental conservation
mobile devices. their drinking behaviour. communities. and reforestation in Australia
and reforestation in Australia and water
sanitation in the developing w
sanitation in the developing world.


Social innovation challenges to develop and test out new ways of creating change and
building the capacity of social entrepreneurs


Online crowdsourcing platforms to promote and share local solutions & methods that work


By bringing social innovators from around the world to Australia to share their work and
methods with us in order to build the capacity of the Australian social economy


and a new kind of social problem solving by turning on its head the way we approach social
problems and resetting the role of people and community in developing local solutions and
inﬂuencing policy development


Over these three years, we’ve learnt a lot about social innovation, the social economy,
different ways of doing things and what it means to be an incubator within the Australian
context.


Learning from and reﬂecting on the experiences of organisations like TACSI is critical if we
are to grow, mature, sustain and scale not just our practices, methods and solutions, but the
social and economic impact that we’re generating.

Today I’d like to share some of the initial insights born from our work over the last three
years, and our current thinking around how we can scale innovation to create systemic
change. I do so not to say that we have or know the all answers - but in the hope that it
inspires discussion and debate amongst you today, and to give some insight into how we can
create the conditions that are required to promote and value experimentation in the social
sector.

1. What social innovation
means to us
2. The kind of innovation
we’re trying to create
3. How we go about doing
this
4. Principles


So in the interests of keeping it as simple as possible, we’re going to stick to four key things:

1. What social innovation means to us
2. The kind of innovation we’re trying to create
3. How we go about doing this
4. Principles

What is social innovation?



Put up your hand if you spoke about...

Outcomes. People. Outputs. Research. Technology. Impact. Measurement. Systems.

Social innovation is an extraordinarily broad concept. It means many many things to many
many people.

“The development and
implementation of new ideas
(products, services and
models) to meet social needs”
Geoff Mulgan et al, In and Out of Sync


If you’re an social entrepreneur, perhaps its about throwing out the rule book and testing out
a radical new idea you’ve had. However, innovation isn’t always a new idea. It could be the
further development of an existing idea or set of ideas and replicating them in a new context.

“A true social innovation is
systems-changing – it
permanently alters the
perceptions, behaviours and
structures that previously
gave rise to these challenges”
Centre for Social Innovation, Canada


If you’re a social scientist or social policy maker, perhaps its more about rethinking the
institutions which underpin how our society works, or reshaping what we do and how we act
by rewarding particular behaviours as has been done with other movements such as ﬁnancial
incentives to promote recycling.

Social investment:
generates social &
environmental benefits, and
that may or may not generate
a financial return.
Centre for Social Impact


If you’re a funder of innovation, perhaps its about new ways to get the best bang for buck,
improving access to social finance, bringing together new players to develop partnerships
and models which enable investment in early stage innovation and experimentation, or
rethinking the existing relationships between government, philanthropic, community and
private sectors in order to improve the way we currently fund and deliver social services.


Different people will have different definitions for, and understandings of, what they mean by
social innovation. They will also have different motivations and value sets which drive and
influence what they do, how they do it and why they do it. Whilst there is always a danger and
risk that we’ll spend far too much of our time fussing over and deliberating over a definition
that can encompass the diversity that exists within this ecosystem, it is important that firstly,
we do have a sense of what social innovation means to each of us, and secondly, that we
consider how this influences the way we communicate what social innovation means for
society at large.

For me personally, social innovation is ultimately about connecting our hearts and our minds.
Our knowledge only has power when its driven by well understood values, and leveraged by
collaborating with people and communities.


At TACSI, we define social innovation, and in turn what we do, in two ways. One is concerned
with the sandpit we play in - the kind of systemic change we try to create by developing
methods and incubating solutions (the knowledge). On the other hand, the other aspect to
how we define our work is centred around a set of core characteristics which define not just
what we do, but how and why we do it. In one sentence, for us social innovation is about
being intentional and doing meaningful things which are useful on the ground, in peoples
lives.

What are we trying to innovate?

Source: Charles Leadbeater


Creating things which are useful can only be done when we are clear about what it is that we
are trying to innovate. Charles Leadbetter, leading thought leader and provocateur, describes
a hierarchy within social innovation whereby we start with individual services/practices. We
then build organisations and systems, this is followed by creating platforms, leveraging
movements/networks and ﬁnally transforming ideologies.

Services/
Practices





Services/
Practices

Organisations





Services/
Practices

Organisations


Systems




Services/
Practices

Organisations


Systems

Platforms




Services/
Practices

Organisations


Movements/
Systems
Networks

Platforms




Services/
Practices

Ideologies Organisations


Movements/
Systems
Networks

Platforms




BOLD IDEAS,
BETTER LIVES
CHALLENGE
Got a bold idea for creating better WANT TO
lives for people in Australia? Want KNOW MORE?
access to amazing mentors and a Applications are
bucket of cash (up to $1million) to now open online
get your idea off the ground? at tacsi.org.au

The Australian Centre for Social Innovation is
(applications close
April 23rd). For
Services/
giving you the chance to turn your big idea into
big impact. We’re committed to supporting up Platforms
more info check
out the website or Orgs
to 10 projects that deliver the best and brightest
ideas in social innovation across Australia. Your
idea could deal with anything from healthcare
email challenge@
tacsi.org.au Practices
to climate change, unemployment to housing
as long as it addresses a social need faced by
communities in Australia.


Our work over the last three years has been mainly focussed around three of these areas: we
are developing new services & practices by radically redesigning the way social services work;
we’ve developed new platforms such as the $1M Bold Ideas Better Lives Social Innovation
Challenge; and lastly, we’re building organisations - by developing curriculum around our
approach to social problem solving, and also by building incubators such as TACSI as well as
thematic incubators such as The Great Living Co which seeks to generate innovation in
ageing.

in system out-of system
Inside Inside Outside
Outside
sustaining
How can we
Sustaining
Sustaining improve
Inside Outside
Inside Outside
customer
experience?
Sustaining
Sustaining
Disruptive
Disruptive
disruptive

Disruptive
Disruptive



As well as understanding what we are trying to do, how we do it - how we build knowledge
and leverage experience - has played a key role in our approach to innovation. Reflecting
again on Charlie’s segmentation of the innovation process, he describes two main
approaches - sustaining and disruptive innovation.

"Sustaining" focuses on innovation that can be incorporated into the existing practices of
organizations. “Disruptive” innovation on the other hand, seeks to disrupt existing models of
success. It requires different models to succeed. Both sustaining and disruptive innovation
can occur within and outside of existing systems.

Sustaining innovation inside of a system is about improvement. The goals are the same, but
innovation is driven by improving existing means.

Sustaining innovation outside of the system is about combination. Again, the goals are the
same, but we use a different mix of means to arrive at those goals.

Disruptive innovation inside of systems is about reinvention. We have revised goals, and
different but still institutional means.

And finally, disruptive innovation outside of the system is about transformation. Different
goals arrived at by very different means.

But this isn’t to say that they don’t sometimes conflict - improvement can at times be the
enemy of transformation. However, no one approach is better than another. All four need to
co-exist within an ecosystem if we are to create systemic change.


incremental
How can we
improve
customer
experience?
radical



If we think about how to translate this framework into our day to day experience lets’
consider public service innovation. This is an in system response that traditionally sits in
the sustaining space. Here we seek to answer the question: “How can we improve user
experience of our current services?”

TACSI’s approach to social problem solving, Radical Redesign, sits in the disruptive out of
system quadrant, where we try to answer the question: “How can we mobilise community
resources to improve outcomes?”

We’ve also started exploring opportunities to work within systems more recently, with the
prototyping of a new solution called Care Reflect that seeks to enable Great Living in Late
Adulthood by developing new developmental and reflective practice models for professional
support workers.

Family by Family, the first social solution to come out of TACSI, is to date our most developed
example of disruptive innovation that sits outside of traditional systems.


incremental
How How can we
can we
improve user
improve
experience of our
PUBLIC customer
current services?
SERVICES experience?
radical





support workers.



incremental
How How can we
can we
improve user
improve
experience of our
PUBLIC customer
current services?
radical

How can we
mobilise
community RADICAL
resources to REDESIGN
improve outcomes?





support workers.



incremental
How How can we
can we
improve user
improve
experience of our
PUBLIC customer
current services?
radical

How can we create How can we
services that mobilise
contribute to community RADICAL
improving resources to REDESIGN
outcomes? improve outcomes?





support workers.


Family by family video
https://vimeo.com/50653317


Family by Family is disruptive in nature because we not only recast the roles of professionals
and community, but we turn the whole process of problem solving in child protection on its
head. Families themselves become the resource.

SOCIAL IMPACT

PROBLEM

Top-down policymaking oﬅen
POLICY OUTCOMES fails to reach a personal level

PRACTICE

policy
making

Traditional policy making is a vertical process: decisions at the top ﬂow down the chain of
command. People are often the last to be reached.

SOCIAL IMPACT

PROBLEM

Bottom-up design oﬅen fails
POLICY OUTCOMES to reach practice and policy

PRACTICE

design
thinking

Bottom up approaches such as design thinking is practice focussed but often unable to
inﬂuence or shift policy and decision making.

SOCIAL IMPACT SOCIAL IMPACT SOCIAL IMPACT

PROBLEM PROBLEM PROBLEM

POLICY OUTCOMES POLICY OUTCOMES POLICY OUTCOMES

PRACTICE PRACTICE PRACTICE

policy design working
making thinking backwards

Our problem solving approach effectively works backwards because we start with people.
First, we work with people to identify what people want and can do before co-designing and
prototyping new kinds of solutions and ways of spreading those solutions (e.g. principles,
platforms, organisations, and services). Each phase of our approach starts with a question. To
answer the question we draw on skills and tools from design, social science, business and
policy development.

business case ethnography

Grow
Look &
Listen

Our
approach
Prototype
Create
prototyping practice prototyping metrics co-design


The ﬁrst phase, LOOK & LISTEN, asks the question: What are good outcomes? and uses
ethnographic methods to better understand what life is like for people.

The second phase, CREATE, asks the question: What ideas could improve outcomes? and
works with people to develop new ideas and interactions.

The third phase, PROTOTYPE, asks the question: What interactions shift outcomes? and
prototypes those new practices. We then test out their effectiveness by asking, What value did
those solutions create?

The ﬁnal phase, GROW, asks the question: How can we spread the solution?

We believe in
5 principles


Doing this kind of work and using this kind of approach over the last few years, has taught us
that social innovation isn’t just deﬁned by the methods and practices we use, but that in
order for solutions to be truly transformative, to tap into our potential as human beings and
to leverage every day experience as a resource, our practice must be grounded by something
else. The principles and values which underpin what we do, how we do it, and why we do it.
These principles communicate the motivations for our work, what we see as its role and
purpose and place, and the qualities which deﬁne and drive our methods and practices.

These principles have come out of our experience, from things that have worked really well,
but also from things which haven’t worked at all. These 5 principles come from our learning:
the successes and the failures.

1 Thriving We believe in


Our ﬁrst principle is that we believe in thriving

We aspire to enable people to live great lives. We believe people need more than to 'bounce
back' from crisis; they need to move beyond 'getting by' toward thriving.

“Life satisfaction in the US has been flat for fiﬅy
years even through GDP has tripled”
Martin Seligman, Flourish. 2011, p233


Today, the core challenge for most of us living in the West isn’t how long we live, but how we
live - how we age, how we work, how we connect to others. We don’t just want to get by - to
be insured from risk or protected from social circumstance - we want to be able to thrive. We
want to have fulfilling relationships, to find and use our talents, to feel good and in-control,
to have a purpose, to enjoy how we spend our time, and probably most of all, to know we
matter as people and not just as workers and consumers.

Of course not everyone in the West has experienced the gains from the last century. 22% of
households in the UK are designated low income, 15% of people in the USA live below the
poverty line, and life expectancy amongst Indigenous Australians is at pre-industrial era
numbers.


If we truly want more people to thrive, we need social solutions that can broaden our
preferences and motivations, teach us new skills, provide us with feedback, cultivate support
networks, help us feel competent & in-control, and remove barriers to change.

Thriving Lives are lives where we actively develop our aspirations, capabilities, relationships
and achievements. Lives where we feel good and in-control.

2 Outcomes We believe in


Our second principle is that we believe in outcomes

VIDEO SLIDE

Our solutions create and measure change in what people do, say, think and feel. We believe
success is about creating the kind of change that's valued by people rather than simply
meeting targets set by systems.

Our experience with the Bold Ideas Better Lives Challenge showed us the importance of
focusing not just on the idea itself, but on the theories underpinning how change happens.
Replicating and scaling impact with high ﬁdelity is impossible if you can’t pin point the
speciﬁc steps to arrive at those outcomes.

Family by family video


Grow
Look &

3 Co-design We believe in Listen

Prototype
Create


Our third principle is that we believe in co-design

The best way we know to create solutions that work for people in context is to develop
solutions with those people in that context, and to keep working with them to adapt those
solutions over time and for new contexts.

Care Reﬂect video


4 Peer-to-peer We believe in


Our fourth principle is that we believe in peer-to-peer

Our work on the ground frequently reveals the untapped human resources in our
communities. We've seen how these can be harnessed and shaped to create positive
outcomes for all involved.

Weavers video
http://vimeo.com/53379675


5 Scale We believe in


And our ﬁfth and ﬁnal principle is that we believe in scale

We design our solutions so they can grow and scale. We believe things that work should be
spread. Whilst we’re still developing our approach to scale, our hunch is that we require three
key ingredients:

Photo of building a business case


Firstly, we are tapping into business thinking to create business models and systems which
underpin and support the growth of our solutions. Business modelling enables us to
approach replication, spread and scale sustainably and with rigour and intentionality.

Photo of building capability


Our second hunch is that scale requires us to build capability - both internally and externally.
This is about skills within solutions, skills within incubators like TACSI, and building
capability more broadly amongst practitioners and policy makers, and across the social
economy. At TACSI, we recognise that this is something we haven’t done a great deal of in
the past, and that it this is an area in which we need to dedicate more resources, which is
why we have created a new role within our organisation that focuses on ways to build our
collective capability around co-design and social problem solving.

Photo of creating partnerships


Our ﬁnal hunch is that partnerships and coalitions play an essential role in scale. Partnerships
and coalitions are formed by champions who believe in the value of innovation and doing
things differently. Partners might be a mix of practitioners, organisations, foundations,
government agencies, and other interested parties.

Coalitions are not just informed by speciﬁc tasks that need to get done, but rather are built
with collaborative relationships in mind, recognising the individual contributions and
experiences that people and organisations bring to the table, and bound together by a
common set of goals, principles and values.

We’re currently actively seeking champions to partner with us to grow our approach to
problem solving, to further develop our solutions for families and older Australians, to
radically redesign more solutions to other social challenges, and to build co-design capability
across Australia.

The signiﬁcant problems we face
cannot be solved at the same level
of thinking that created them.
Albert Einstein


Australia is in a strong position to be demonstrating global leadership in social innovation.
We have a strong economy, characterised by low levels of public debt and an abundance of
natural resources. What can be achieved through cross sectoral leadership is evident right
here in Western Australia.

Leadership from government has led to dedicated funding for social innovation and social
enterprise.

Leadership in giving is demonstrated through the continued growth of organisations like
Giving West.

Leadership amongst corporates is evident through partnerships between business and local
incubators such as SiiWA and Pollinators.

Leadership in social ﬁnancing continues to be demonstrated by organisations like Lottery
West.

The conditions for transformative, disruptive social innovation exist here in WA. The
challenge moving forward is how we can harness these resources in a way which activates
and grows a culture of valuing experimentation - in particular, innovation which disrupts the
status quo, transforms systems, and in doing so, creates new goals and aspirations in, with
and for people.

More tacsi.org.au

Papers tacsi.org.au/publications

Video vimeo.com/tacsi

Tweets @ozinnovation + @cstenta

Email christian.stenta@tacsi.org.au


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