Organizations and people co-design innovative and sustainable solutions to create shared value.

What is Collaborative Social Innovation?

Photo from grafixer on Flickr

Collaborative social innovation initiatives involve businesses, governments, non-profits and change makers coming together to co-create innovative and sustainable solutions around a shared purpose. Such initiatives typically focus on the areas that have the highest potential to create shared value: environment, energy and sustainability; health, wellness and nutrition; education, learning and capability building; and governance, public services and public spaces. Change makers are typically rewarded with prize money, recognition, funding or support; organizations find solutions to important challenges; and society at large benefits from the innovative solutions.

As a result, we are seeing a number of platforms focusing on different aspects of collaborative social innovation.

OpenIDEO (video) by design and innovation consultancy IDEO has partnered with businesses, governments, and non-profits to create a series of collaborative social innovation challenges.

OpenIDEO by IDEO

ChallengePost, MindMixer (video), Ashoka Change makers (video) and One Billion Minds (video) are other third-party collaborative social innovation platforms which enable organizations to create challenges for the public. ChallengePost focuses on open government challenges and MindMixer encourages civic engagement, while Ashoka Change makers and One Billion Minds feature a wide range of social innovation challenges. Other platforms, like MIT Center for Collective Intelligence’s Climate CoLab project, are focused on a single topic, like climate change.

Open government is another important area for collaborative social innovation. In the US, Challenge.gov, which is built on ChallengePost, has created a series of open government challenges for federal, state and local agencies, while Data.gov encourages developers to build applications using its public data sets and showcases the best applications. In parallel, organizations like Sunlight Foundation (video) and Code for America (video) are helping create the ecosystem to enable collaborative social innovation. In the UK, SparkCentral is a government collaborative social innovation platform that aims to “build partnerships across the public, private and voluntary sectors to deliver more for less.” In Finland, OpenMinistry is a legislation crowdsourcing platform that enables Finnish citizens to propose new laws to the parliament.

Some of these collaborative social innovation platforms have had significant impact. For instance, Ashoka Change makers has channeled $600 million in funding to more than 10,000 social innovators, through more than 50 challenges, with the help of more than 500,000 community members.

Ashoka Changemakers

The success of collaborative social innovation initiatives shows that organizations and people are capable of co-creating innovative solutions to complex problems, and has created a new model for change makers to showcase their innovations, for governments and foundations to find solutions to societal issues and for businesses to realize sustainable growth.

Like MIT’s Thomas W. Malone says:

“We want to create more intelligent organizations, more intelligent businesses, more intelligent governments, more intelligent societies. As all the people and computers on our planet get more and more closely connected, it’s becoming increasingly useful to think of all the people and computers on the planet as a kind of global brain.”

How does Collaborative Social Innovation work?

Source: grafixer on Flickr

Collaborative social innovation platforms are typically a hybrid of three models: innovation challenges, innovation ecosystems, and open data platforms.

Most online collaborative social innovation initiatives follow a contest model in which an organization posts a challenge on a platform and invites individuals, groups of individuals or other organizations to submit innovations. These innovations can be at any stage of completion, ranging from ideas or sketches to full-blown business proposals to products, services or technologies that already exist at a smaller scale.

Some platforms include a structured design thinking approach with inspiration, concepting, evaluation and collaboration phases (OpenIDEO (video)); while others break up the challenge into what, where and who elements (Climate CoLab). Some platforms match community members with challenges based on interest (ChallengePost) while other motivate community members by using game mechanics like a design quotient score (OpenIDEO).

Innovations are judged either quantitatively according to a set of scoring criteria or qualitatively by a panel of judges typically made up of experts, specialists and members of the funding committee. In some cases, community members must vote on ideas to increase their chances of appearing before the judges. Winning innovators are rewarded with either cash prizes (ChallengePost, Ashoka Change makers (video)) or with recognition and satisfaction that they have helped contribute to social good (OpenIDEO, OpenMinistry).

Some of these innovation challenge platforms are designed primarily as destination communities (OpenIDEO, One Billion Minds (video)), while others offer white label options to enable organizations to create their own standalone challenge platforms (ChallengePost, MindMixer (video)).

For some platforms, like Ashoka Change makers, the innovation challenges are a small part of the overall innovation ecosystem, which includes community, capability building and funding.

For other platforms, like Data.gov, the innovation challenges serve the purpose of connecting government agencies who can share public data with change makers and developers who can build applications on top of this data to improve how these agencies deliver public services.

In essence, all collaborative social innovation platforms are designed around four dynamics: connect, catalyze, crystallize, and celebrate. First, platforms need to connect stakeholders so that they have a context to engage with the organization and with each other. Then, platforms need to catalyze interactions so that new ideas and projects can emerge organically. Next, platforms need to synthesize these ideas into solutions that benefit from and build upon the best ideas. Finally, platforms need to celebrate the most powerful or popular ideas, actions and stories by highlighting them.

Collaborative Social Innovation for Brands

Just like third-party collaborative social innovation platforms, branded collaborative social innovation platforms are typically a hybrid of three models: innovation challenges, innovation ecosystems, and open data platforms.

Social innovation challenges that are part of a company’s business strategy usually benefit the change-maker or innovator, the business itself and society at large. In such programs, the brand is usually looking to invest in or acquire the innovation, or promote it by supporting it with its business scale. For instance, since the launch of the GE Ecomagination Challenge (video) to find innovations in energy and sustainability, GE has committed $134 million to 22 investments and commercial partnerships, granted $1.1 million in seed funding to early stage companies and entrepreneurs, and acquired one of the businesses that entered the challenge.

GE Ecomagination Challenge

Some companies commit to long-term social innovation challenge platforms, with the intention of creating an ecosystem to connect change makers and build capabilities. For instance, both Mahindra Spark the Rise (video) and Pepsi Refresh Project (video) ran for two years and created significant impact. We have covered both these initiatives in our Future of Engagement report on Crowdfunding as examples of crowdfunding programs focused on creators.

Anand Mahindra, Chairman and Managing Director of Mahindra Group, talked about the role of such initiatives:

“The way companies build brands has evolved. In version 2.0, we saw companies come in with a larger purpose and meaning, beyond the business. Now, we are trying to build a 21st century corporation, by energizing people and giving them a core purpose to be part of.”

Some of these social innovation ecosystems take the shape of public-private partnerships that bring together stakeholders from business, government, academia and civil society to institutionalize social innovation. For instance, Walmart has created 14 Sustainable Value Networks since 2005 to bring together diverse stakeholders to develop solutions to fulfill Walmart’s commitment towards renewable energy, zero waste and sustainable products. IBM launched the Smarter Cities Challenge (video) to collaborate with local governments and co-fund technology-based solutions to city-specific urban challenges. HP launched the Catalyst Initiative (video) to collaborate with educators in finding innovative solutions to enhance student literacy in STEM subjects.

In other collaborative social innovation initiatives, companies create open networks to share intellectual property and know-how, and encourage stakeholders to build upon it. As an example, to realize its vision of sustainable “considered design”, Nike created the GreenXchange (video) in 2009 as an open platform for companies and people to share green intellectual property, processes and ideas.

Michael Dell, CEO and Chairman of Dell, sums up the opportunity this positive multi-stakeholder approach opens up for all of us:

“The new engine of innovation driven by collaboration, openness, stewardship and the power of the social web gives all of us an opportunity to drive even more rapid, meaningful change across global institutions.”

The Future of Collaborative Social Innovation

In the near future, we expect collaborative social innovation to become the norm both for corporations creating innovations that create shared value and governments and change makers designing solutions for social good.

Even as white label open innovation platforms like BrightIdea and People’s Lab mature, we will see more specialized platforms like ChallengePost and MindMixer (video), which are focused on social innovation and civic engagement.

Even as more corporations create branding-driven collaborative social innovation challenges, we expect more Fortune 500 firms to follow GE’s example and create challenges which have a direct business impact, by investing in the winning innovations, or using their business clout to scale them.

As open government data and application programming interfaces (APIs) become that norm, we expect many more governments to open up civic data and invite developers to build applications on top of them. We also expect some non-profits and corporations to experiment with this model and share data or intellectual property in an open network so that third party developers can build social innovation applications on them.

In a TED Talk, former U.S. Deputy Chief Technology Officer Beth Noveck said:

“If we want to see the hopeful, exciting kinds of innovations in clean energy and education and development, if we want to see those adopted and scaled, we must all participate. Open up institutions and let the nutrients flow throughout our culture to create open institutions, a stronger democracy, a better tomorrow.”

Finally, as organizations become better at designing and measuring collaborative social innovation initiatives, we will see them investing heavily to replicate pilot innovations across markets and scale their impact (Walmart Sustainable Value Networks).

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This is a chapter from a MSLGROUP report titled “Now & Next: Future of Engagement” that I wrote with Pascal Beucler and Nidhi Makhija.

The report highlights the ten most important frontiers that will define the future of engagement for marketers, entrepreneurs and changemakers: Crowdfunding, Behavior Change Games, Collaborative Social Innovation, Grassroots Change Movements, Co-creation Communities, Social Curation, Transmedia Storytelling, Collective Intelligence, Social Live Experiences and Collaborative Consumption.

In each of these reports, we start by describing why they are important, how they work, and how brands might benefit from them; we then examine web platforms and brand programs that point to the future (that is already here); then finish by identifying some of the most important features of that future, with our recommendations on how to benefit from them.

Future of Engagement report on SlideShare

Future of Engagement slide deck on SlideShare

Future of Engagement video infographic on YouTube

Future of Engagement infographic on Visually

Now & Next: Future of Engagement infographic