Innovation and social innovation, what exactly are we talking about? What are their common points, and their specificities? A shared understanding of these notions is essential to facilitate the move to action.
“Social innovation consists of developing new responses to new or poorly satisfied social needs in the current market and social policy conditions, involving the participation and cooperation of the actors concerned, particularly users. These innovations concern both the product or service and the mode of organization and distribution. They undergo several phases: emergence, experimentation, diffusion, and evaluation. ”
Social innovation: A new response to met social needs
Although social innovation has been attracting growing interest in recent years, it continues to call for multiple definitions. A majority agrees that it consists of developing new responses to social needs that are little or badly satisfied, which neither the state nor the market can meet alone.
Characterization of social innovation
To detect, support, or finance social innovation, it is still necessary to know how to identify the socially innovative character of a project. The Higher Council for the Social and Solidarity Economy has formulated orientations to characterize social innovation. It offers a grid of non-hierarchical criteria designed as benchmarks. Several simple questions allow you to carry out a quick analysis of a project:
- Does the project provide a response to an unsatisfied social need?
- Is the project experimental, and does it include risk-taking?
- Is the project careful to involve the actors concerned?
- Does the project generate other positive effects?
The different dimensions of innovation
Innovation has become the watchword for businesses in the 21st century. Important vector of the strategy of organizations, the term is polysemic, and its definition varies according to the points of view and the context in which it is used.
One way to qualify an innovation is to focus on the nature of the novelty it introduces. The diagram below identifies five possible dimensions for an innovation. In practice, social innovation never occurs alone, it is always associated with one or more of these dimensions.
The different phases of the innovation process
To fully understand the concept of innovation, it is necessary to distinguish between the targeted result (product, service, process, etc.) and the action of innovating (the process that makes it possible to create innovations).
The innovation process is often modeled in several phases and does not always take place linearly, continuously influenced by the environment and the stakeholders involved.
Maximize your social impact
Social impact is a concept defined by the Higher Council for the Social and Solidarity Economy and consists of: “all the consequences (evolutions, inflections, changes, ruptures) of the activities of an organization both on its external stakeholders (beneficiaries, users, customers) directly or indirectly of its territory and internal (employees, volunteers, volunteers), then on society in general”.
Maximizing the social impact of its structure is often the first motivation for social innovation companies. This guides the strategic choices that punctuate the significant stages of progress in the innovation process.
Depending on your situation, you can:
- consolidate your social impact;
- optimize it (seek performance);
- improve it (qualitatively);
- increase it (quantitatively);
- multiply it (reproduce it in other territories).
By regularly questioning the purpose of your company and the social impact it wishes to have, you will be able to open up new fields of innovation: new activities, new audiences, etc.
Strengthen the economic sustainability of its structure
In social innovation companies, the economic equation and the social equation are closely linked. The ability of the structure to accomplish its social mission will depend on its ability to maintain an economic balance to carry out its project under the best conditions.
Although innovation is a risky bet requiring significant financial and human resources for an uncertain result, we observe that it nevertheless constitutes an eminently strategic element for consolidating the economic models of companies.
Innovation makes it possible to diversify its sources of income, optimize its processes, or strengthen its position in a market. Innovation is then perceived as a priority to ensure the economic sustainability of the company.