Tag Archives: social innovation

On social innovation (and the end of the world as we know it)

In the last year, as I took part in a Council of Europe workgroup that tries to make sense of some emergent phenomena in the economy, I got the idea that social innovation is really, really important. Certainly important enough to curve the mental space I inhabit: whatever I do I seem get more and more entangled into it. The latest news – though not the last, I have a feeling – is that the Young Foundation, a British think tank close to the European Commission’s President Barroso and the single most active organization on the social innovation front, has enrolled me for the advisory board of the new Social Innovation Initiative for Europe. The projects’s objective is to create a social innovation community hub that, among other things, will provide input into the design of a new European social innovation fund.

European funds are large scale financial instruments for public policy. They are measured in hundreds of millions of euro, if not billions. Their allocation criteria among and within member states are the object of thorough negotiations, led by the highest ranking European public officials. The Commission does not design new funds every day: clearly, someone at the top thinks this is a very important matter.

From my vantage point as a Council of Europe advisor it is not hard to figure out what’s going on. The representative of the States in our group are worried silly: the welfare state, keystone of the European social model and staple ingredient of the Old Continent’s humanized version of capitalism, is crumbling before an irreversible fiscal crisis. No one believes the current level of public service provision is defensible within the current model. And no, it can’t be put down to ineffective management. We are not talking about Italy or Greece here: the most worried people I talked to come from advanced welfare countries like Austria or Norway, in which the public would never accept a retreat from the current service level – a retreat that, nevertheless, is coming.

Interestingly, though, no one is talking about privatization. We learned a lesson in the 80s, and that is that privatized public services are not necessarily any cheaper than those directly provided by the State. There are many reasons for this, and an important one is that the private for-profit sector wants to, well, make a profit. And that means high margins: if they are not there, private business is simply not interested. Here’s where social innovators gets to be given a chance; their blend of social economy (i.e. weak orientation to profit) and disruptive innovation borrowed from their Silicon Valley brethren is the only candidate for providing solution to turn public services around the way Wikipedia did with encyclopedia writing, defending the level of service while driving costs way down.

It does not take a genius to figure out where this is going. It leads to public services that are redesigned from the ground up, and that will look nothing like what we are used to. School? YouTube videos (Khan Academy style) instead of teachers in classrooms. Health care? Online fora instead of queing up at your local doctor for most less serious conditions. University? A badge system for informal learning on the open web instead of degrees (the Mozilla Foundation is working on it already). Policy design? Wikicracies instead of professional weberian bureaucracies. It’s safe to predict that the transition to such a scenario will be problematic, and it will imply very many people who are working in the public sector becoming — to put it bluntly — completely useless, because we can’t use what they can do and they can’t do what we need done.

The fund that the European Commission is designing can address at best half the problem; enabling social innovators to rethink radically public services. The other half is to make sure that the social contract holds, and that scared, enraged Europeans do not take to the street to set fire to cars, ATMs or their slightly different-looking neighbours. For this we need a high level political leadership: the present system was conceived by giants like Bismarck (the pension system) and Lord Beveridge (modern welfare). Let’s hope we find comparably enlightened leaders for the current phase.

Lo Stato che impara: come integrare l’innovazione sociale nelle politiche mainstream

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Faccio parte di un gruppo di lavoro al Consiglio d’Europa che si occupa di “Quality job creation through social links and social innovation” (l’espressione “social innovation” è un’aggiunta recente al nome del gruppo; di questa aggiunta credo di essere in parte responsabile). Uno dei problemi che ci stiamo ponendo è questo: stante che esiste un gruppo di persone interessanti, che chiamano se stessi innovatori sociali; stante che queste persone sembrano avere un potenziale per migliorare la società che abitano; stante che sembra si tratti di soggetti di nuovo tipo – che, quindi, richiedono politiche pubbliche di nuovo tipo, diverse da quelle per le imprese e per il mondo del non profit; stante tutto questo, ne consegue che alle autorità pubbliche si richiede di fare cose nuove, forse anche radicalmente nuove. Bene. Ma come imparano le istituzioni?

Mi sembra una domanda importante. Ho lavorato a progetti pilota pubblici apprezzati come innovativi (Kublai o Visioni Urbane, per esempio); la sfida che attende questi progetti è la trasformazione in metodi che fanno parte del normale arsenale con cui le autorità che li hanno varati affrontano il mondo. Con il sostegno del Consiglio d’Europa ho potuto affrontare il problema in modo strutturato. La mia conclusione provvisoria è che il modello prevalente di apprendimento per le autorità pubbliche è razionale-weberiano e completamente sbagliato. Funziona così:

Un problema nuovo viene avvertito dalla pubblica opinione
Politici in concorrenza tra loro per i voti degli elettori lo incorporano nelle loro piattaforme elettorali, insieme alle soluzioni che propongono
Una volta eletti, i rappresentanti del popolo legiferano in conseguenza delle loro piattaforme elettorali
La nuova legge si trasforma, in modo lineare, in policy, cioè in azione da parte del governo

Questo modello è elegante ma inutilizzabile. Richiederebbe (1) che politiche alternative (per esempio: carbone pulito vs. rinnovabile vs. nucleare per la politica energetica) potessero venire discusse in profondità e in modo razionale già nelle campagne elettorali; (2) che l’elettorato avesse modi efficaci di vincolare gli eletti alle loro promesse elettorali; (3) che la conversione di una legge in policy fosse “lineare” e non richiedesse interpretazione da parte dell’esecutivo; e (4) che le politiche fossero una strada a senso unico, cioè un fenomeno che influenza la società ma non ne viene a sua volta influenzato. Nessuno di questi requisiti è soddisfatto, nemmeno lontanamente.

E allora? Allora ha più senso abbandonare Weber e la metafora del meccanismo come strumento per capire l’azione di governo, e abbracciare invece, quella dell’ecosistema. Propongo di considerare le autorità pubbliche come sistemi adattivi complessi che coevolvono con la società e l’economia. Insegnare loro ad avere a che fare con l’innovazione sociale – o qualunque cosa nuova, al di fuori della loro esperienza – significa cercare di aiutarle a pensare gli agenti economici e sociali come mossi dalle forze dell’evoluzione, che naturalmente premiano il più adatto. La policy, in questo contesto, diventa l’atto di strutturare un fitness landscape che porti gli agenti ad incamminarsi verso il risultato auspicato. Invece di preterminare i propri esiti top-down, essa abilita e incentiva gli agenti a fornirle input. Questo ha precise conseguenze sulla progettazione dell’azione di governo in pratica. Una di queste è che un’architettura costituzionale che abilita l’apprendimento dal basso (come la Common law) è intrinsecamente superiore a una che non lo fa.

Se ti interessa l’argomento puoi leggere il paper (in inglese): il Consiglio d’Europa mi ha autorizzato a condividerlo. Grazie a Gilda Farrell e Fabio Ragonese per la gentile concessione.

The learning State: integrating social innovation into mainstream policy

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I joined a Council of Europe workgroup on Quality job creation through social links and social innovation (the social innovation part is a recent add to the group’s name, and I think I am partly responsible for the add). One of the issues we are discussing is this: given that there is an interesting group of people who started calling themselves social innovators; given that these people seem to have potential for improving the society they (and we) live in; given that they look like a new kind of social and economic agent, as such requiring a new kind of public policy – the ones in place for firms and nonprofit orgs might not work in their case; given all this, it follows that public authorities might soon be required to do new things, perhaps radically new ones. That’s great; but how do public authorities actually learn?

This looks like a relevant question to me. I have worked on pilot government initiatives hailed by some as innovative, like Kublai or Visioni Urbane; the challenge they now face is integration into mainstream policy, becoming a part of the default arsenal for their parent authorities to do their job. Thanks to the Council of Europe’s support I have been able to look deeper into the issue. My provisional conclusion is that the prevailing learning model for public authorities is rational-Weberian and way off the mark. Here’s how it works:

a new issue, after its importance has been validated by the scientific community, gains importance in the eye of the public opinion.
politicians, competing for votes, include it in the list of issues they promise to tackle once elected.
after taking office, representatives embed action to be taken thereabout into law.
new law is enacted into policy

This model is elegant but useless. It only works if (1) alternative courses of actions can be identified, discussed and selected already in the democratic debate phase; (2) the electorate has effective means to enforce their pact with its representatives, constraining them to keep their promise by making law; (3) law enactment is “linear”, i.e. a law translates unambiguously in a course of action at the level of the executive branch (the main tool for law enactment is generally assumed to be the impersonal, rational Weberian bureaucracy); (4) and policy is a one way street: government acts upon society, trying to mould it according to its goals, whereas society does not exert any influence on government, save through the democratic process. None of this is even remotely true.

So what? So it makes more sense to abandon Weber and the mechanism metaphor for framing governance, and embrace an ecosystem metaphor instead. I propose to look at public authorities as complex adapive systems, coevolving with society and the economy. Teaching them to deal with social innovation – or anything they never experienced before – means helping them to think of economic and social agents as driven by evolutionary forces that reward the fittest. Policy, then, works best by shaping the fitness landscape, and letting agents work their way through it towards the desired outcome. It is a policy that enables and incentivizes agents to give input, rather than forcing outcomes top-down. This has clear implication for designing policies in practice. One of them is that a constitutional architecture that enables bottom-up learning (like Common law) is inherently superior to one that does not.

If you care about this topic, you can read the paper: the Council of Europe authorized me to share it online. Thanks to Gilda Farrell and Fabio Ragonese for the kind concession.