Climate change, ageing, joblessness, a healthcare crisis: tomorrow is a tangle of problems. The solution may lie not in politics, but in a 'social innovation' movement that is generating groundbreaking ideas
Gdynia, near Gdansk, does not compare to San Francisco or Shanghai as one of the great urban centres of ideas and invention. But last month it was giving both cities a good run for their money when it came to buzz and intellectual energy.
This former fishing village in Poland, now a city of 250,000 people, was chosen to host the first international winter school in social innovation, which attracted 70 experts from all corners of the globe, including Korea, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Australia and the UK. All were seeking new, creative solutions to the increasingly serious social challenges of our times. Some were looking to solve problems relating to health; others were exercised by the problem of wealth (or rather the lack of it). Youth joblessness was a theme, as was ageing. No profit motive was attached or product pitch involved. This was just people offering ingenuity and services.
The passion for social innovation is not new. But, as the success of the event in Gdynia demonstrated, an exponential rise in interest seems to be taking place, partly because of the impact of the internet and partly because government coffers are running empty and some of the bigger challenges appear intractable. Often, successful innovation means the addition of a new ingredient to what is already familiar. The arrival of television, for example, plus long-distance learning, created the Open University. Add cars to older people in need of a regular lunch, and meals on wheels is born. Hospices, charity shops, the Samaritans, the Boy Scouts and Girl Guides are all examples of social innovation that eventually became part of the nation's furniture.
The first three-day summer international school for social innovation was held in 2008 in San Sebastián in the Basque country. It was organised, among others, by the Young Foundation, Cisco and the Social Innovation Exchange, which allows social innovators around the world to exchange ideas. But Gdynia represented the movement's first foray into the winter months.
In a former wartime Messerschmitt factory, now converted into an innovation centre, the group of 70 came together to assess what's coming round the corner in 2015 and how best we can all cope. The immediate impression was that coping would involve the use of a lot of Post-it notes.
Jim Dator, an expert in futurology (who also acknowledges that almost everything foretold is bound to be wrong – rights for robots and paperless offices instantly come to mind) is fond of saying that, for any prediction to come true, it must first sound ridiculous.
Hence, several years ago, when Gorka Espiau, one of the those in Gdynia, and his colleagues at DenokInn, the Basque Social Centre for Innovation in Bilbao, first began to collaborate with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a group of videogame designers on a low-cost folding electric car that opens from the front (so a wheelchair-user can roll in), is "driven" via a laptop by a motorist of any age and ability, and can store secrets about the way we behave (for instance, the vehicle can be programmed not to exceed 50mph), the plan probably sounded too daft for words.
Several million euros later, Hiriko, meaning "from the city" in Basque, launches next month, in Berlin, Malmö, Barcelona, San Francisco and Quito in Ecuador (London missed out).
Espiau says that the car is low-cost, around €12,000 and it will be rented out by the hour at a low rate, but whoever wants you parked in their forecourt – supermarket, cinema or optician – also foots the leasing charge. It will be small-scale in production, with factories sited in areas of high unemployment. So in Malmö, Sweden, according to Espiau, there is 90% unemployment among the largest population of Iraqis living outside their home country. Now a number of them will work on Hiriko.
"This isn't just about a car," says Espiau. "This is about bringing together people from very different professions, architecture, videogames, the web, who are driven by the belief that the poorest can be mobile; even the long-term out-of-work can have jobs. Social innovation sometimes means nice people losing money. Hiriko will show we can make social change."
Some of the original attendees of San Sebastián in 2008 were also at this first winter school. They were told by Geoff Mulgan, chief executive of Nesta, the organisation that promotes social innovation in the UK, that the challenges have not changed in the last four years, only their scale.
In many parts of the world, people are living longer, but spending more of their final years in poorer health. Health and social care is eating into national budgets. So how, for instance, will new social media and different services and organisations help to ride to the rescue on a range of issues such as education?
Femi Longe, based in Nigeria, tells us that 10 years ago the country had only 866,000 telephone lines. Now, in a population of 116 million, there are 88 million mobile subscribers – mostly young people. His newly established Co-Creation Hub, independent from government, is working on 16 different ventures. They include apps that will tell citizens about their constitutional rights (Your Rights in Your Pocket), apps to help students with study, and apps to encourage greater transparency and less corruption in the government's budget (BudgeIT).
In Gdynia, we heard how a partnership between food companies Danone and Lubella, supermarket chain Biedrinka, and the Institute of Mother and Child in Warsaw had produced a breakfast porridge offering 25% of a child's daily vitamins and minerals, costing a few pence and cleverly marketed for "supermums of all income groups". Since its launch in 2006, 50 million portions of Mleczny Start (Milky Start) have been sold, 27% to Poland's poorest families. Profit goes back into promotion. "One bright idea doesn't solve the causes of infant malnutrition," said one of the team, "but at least it gives a child a better start."
Simon Tucker, chief executive of the Young Foundation, said: "Social innovation is the only way to build a future we might actually want to live in. Even after the current financial crisis, challenges such as ageing populations and climate change mean we just cannot continue as we are with minor improvements. Social innovation is a more constructive response than protest, more active than trusting in technocrats – we are together taking responsibility for shaping our future and our children's future."
Yvonne Roberts is a fellow of the Young Foundation
Social innovation around the world
Check You Out!
UsCreates, a design company headed by Zoe Stanton and Mary Rose Cook, worked with the Prince's Trust, Empire Cinemas, Birmingham East and North primary care trust and 60 young people, including 30 selected as "youth ambassadors", in Birmingham to devise a campaign to improve testing for chlamydia. It is the most common sexually transmitted infection in young people, affecting one in 12, and has no symptoms.
At Gdynia, Mary Rose explained how the young people tackled the lack of knowledge and stigma. They came up with the slogan Check You Out!, used themselves as the "face" of the campaign; designed orange wrist bands, offered a free cinema screening with a health trainer in the lavatories who rewarded young people who took the urine test with free popcorn and a soft drink, which achieved a 100% testing rate.
The young people also set up a Facebook page – Check You Out! It now has more than 5,000 followers; they entered a film-making competition and designed billboards and postcards using the ambassadors to push home the message that screening matters. The 12-month strategy has won several awards, including the Best of Health Awards 2010.
Hello Sunday Morning
In 2008, Craig Raine, aged 24, who lives in Brisbane, decided to say goodbye to his habitual Sunday morning hangover and try sobriety for a year. "I wanted to know why I drank and what my motivation was to do it and what it would take to influence the way other people looked at [drinking]. Nobody thought I'd last the 12 months," he said. Hello Sunday Morning was born.
It consists of a website, to which people sign up and pledge not to drink for three months. They blog their progress. Research into behaviour change tells us a public pledge reinforces resolve. Raine resumed drinking after 12 months. "It's part of life," he says, "but Hello Sunday Morning is about when it becomes a problem, when you depend upon it psychologically to have certain experiences or fun."
In 2010, the Australian Centre for Social Innovation, established the year before, selected Hello Sunday Morning as one of eight projects and schemes chosen from 258 ideas contributed from all over Australia, to fund and support.
Hello Sunday Morning has been hugely popular, especially among younger people. The target this year is for it to reach 10,000 supporters and then become a worldwide movement towards a better drinking culture. "I signed up to HSM," says Brenton Caffin, head of Centre for Social Innovation. "I didn't have a problem with alcohol but I wanted to see if I could do it. It worked for me."
The Kafka Brigade
Originally established in the Netherlands in the 1990s, the Kafka Brigade now has a UK counterpart in Wales. Its aim is to reduce red tape and regulations and bureaucratic dysfunction. Frontline workers, the public, managers and policymakers are all required to take part, to analyse what's wrong and to come up with a solution.
Some solutions are simple. For instance, in 2007 in Amsterdam, 37,000 people were leaving prison only to reoffend and be involved in petty crime, because of homelessness, delays in receiving benefits and unemployment. The Kafka project meant that prisoners begin applying for benefits before their release; are better supported to find jobs; and homeless ex-offenders are a target cohort for special housing support.
The Kafka Brigade UK has also helped to reduce the numbers of young people not in employment education or training (Neets)in Cardiff and Swansea. In 2010, Swansea was recognised as showing one of the two most improved performances in Wales for supporting Neets. A review published this year described the Kafka Brigade contribution as "a valuable process that helped clarify performance indicators, rationalised the action plan and led to individuals and organisations taking more responsibility for reducing the proportion of young people not in employment education or training".
The Kafka Brigade is a partner with the thinktank Kennisland (Knowledgeland), headed by Chris Sigaloff.
The Water Hackathon
The Water Hackathon took place over two days in October simultaneously in Bangalore, Cairo, Kampala, Lima, London, Nairobi, Tel Aviv and Washington DC.
Lack of adequate safe water and sanitation is the world's single largest cause of illness, responsible for more than two million deaths a year. As the global population grows, and demands on natural resources increase, the sustainable management of water is ever more urgent.
Technologists, engineers, programmers, designers, water experts and people with ideas worked together over one weekend to come up with solutions. At the Co-creation Hub in Lagos, represented at the winter school in Gdynia by Femi Longe, a co-founder, 32 people worked together, as part of Random Hacks of Kindness. The group came up with a number of ideas, including mobile phone games to educate Nigerians on the use of water; a mobile system to name and shame companies whose packaging clogs the drainage system the most and a mobile tool to crowdsource (encourage the public to become citizen watchdogs) and track burst pipes and leakages across the system and get them fixed quickly .
The challenge is turning ideas into concrete projects and scaling them up, but companies such as Microsoft and organisations like the World Bank are investing: they see new markets in the global population explosion.
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