DefinitionSocial innovation is an initiative, product or process or program that profoundly changes the basic routines, resource and authority flows or beliefs of any social system. Successful social innovations have durability and broad impact. While social innovation has recognizable stages and phases, achieving durability and scale is a dynamic process that requires both emergence of opportunity and deliberate agency, and a connection between the two. The capacity of any society to create a steady flow of social innovations, particularly those which re-engage vulnerable populations, is an important contributor to the overall social and ecological resilience.
The concept is founded on the following assumptions:
- The need for social innovation is obvious and compelling. The opportunity for social innovation is less obvious, but, equally compelling.
- Social problems are, by nature, complex problems- social innovators work in complex systems.
- Social innovation requires collaborative enterprise; the social sector, public sector and private sector must work together to create transformative change.
- Social innovation requires new forms of knowledge production, combining knowledge from multiple disciplines and from both theory and practice to reframe and solve problems.
Waterloo Applied Complexity and Innovation Seminars
The focus of the WICI Seminar Series is to bring together students and researchers from across the University of Waterloo who are interested in understanding the complex processes that will be central to human well being in the 21st century.
George Francis - World and Other Systems: A Challenge to WICI
Lee Smolin - Symmetries in Economic Models and their Consequences
Matthew Hoffman - Governance Avalanches: A Self-Organized Criticality Perspective on Innovation in Global Governance
Frances Westley - Social Innovation & Resilience: A Complexity Approach to Change and Transformation
Keith Hipel - Trade vs. the Environment: Strategic Settlement from a Systems Engineering Perspective
Thomas Homer-Dixon - Ingenuity Theory: Adaptation Failure and Societal Crisis
