Long read: the cult of innovation

Social innovators need to redirect their efforts towards more transformative economic solutions that resonate with more traditional communities, says Dan Gregory

Over the last few years, the idea of social innovation has gained significant currency. It has become an increasingly popular term in the UK and the US in particular, as policymakers, politicians, trusts and foundations have weighed in with rhetoric and resources to champion the idea. Its stock has soared, swept upwards like an edible humanitarian aid drone carried in the beak of a passing mountain eagle.

Innovation has also become a key criteria for funders. The UK government has funded a rash of social innovation hubs, labs, accelerators, incubators and catapults, and former President Obama established an Office of Social Innovation while Stanford, Duke, Oxford and Cambridge Universities each have their own social innovation research centres.

‘Would Brexit and Trump have happened if we

hadn’t had our heads stuck up “agile disruption” hubs’

All too often we have our own petty tribes and agendas, but it seems social innovation can unite us. So let’s get beyond my passion for social enterprise vs. your commitment to multi-stakeholder co-operatives. Or my faith in the commons vs. your social entrepreneurship. Enough already with my profit-with-purpose against your community development—social innovation can be a common denominator across these factions and fractions.

Since social innovation appears to transcend ideology, it is seemingly insulated from criticism. On one hand, it suggests the kind of social change and social progress for which many of us on the Left would advocate. On the other hand, it sounds sufficiently modern and business-like to appeal to those on the right who admire Silicon Valley and its new, shiny inventions that they can profit from.

Is social innovation merely a distraction?
Yet perhaps this inoffensiveness is revealing. Social innovation itself doesn’t actually mean all that much, beyond ‘new ways that humans do stuff’, which is pretty broad. There is nothing really inherently good or valuable about social innovation. Just like all innovations, social innovations can be good and they can be bad. The NHS was a social innovation, for instance. So were roller discos. So was National Socialism.

Social innovations are only as intrinsically virtuous as things that are yellow. Some of them are great, but others less so. This is fine as long as we understand this and don’t get too overexcited by yellow things and start hunting them down, valuing them excessively or hurriedly swallowing them whole without some consideration.

Yet that’s exactly what has happened to social innovation. It has evolved from something that can be observed as a phenomenon to something that can be consciously pursued as an activity. It has been instrumentalised, become a thing. As Lee Vinsel, professor of Science and Technology Studies at Stevens Institute of Technology, argues, ‘Entire societies have come to talk about innovation as if it were an inherently desirable value, like love, fraternity, courage, beauty, dignity, or responsibility.’

This is silly. Imagine a Start-Up Incubator for Yellow Things! Or a Yellow Things Accelerator Hub! But worse than silly, it’s also dangerous. A disproportionate fixation on social innovation has come to overshadow and distract us from the critical maintenance work of charities, social enterprises and community groups. What’s more, fetishising a narrow, self-styled, self-conscious conception of social innovation underplays the longer-term, more ad-hoc, more organic role of civil society and the social economy in shaping markets and the state.

Could Brexit and Trump have been prevented?
Social innovators should know better. At least they should now in 2017, when the events of 2016 can be interpreted as a failure of social innovators to really make any meaningful impact on the social and economic challenges of our times. The aftermath of the Brexit referendum and the election of President Trump have revealed what many of us should have already known—if we hadn’t had our heads stuck up agile disruption hubs or strapped in lean innovation catapults.

Whatever your views on the outcome of the Brexit and US Presidential contests, the depth and diligence of the post-match analysis makes Gary Neville look like, er, Donald Trump. The endless hot-takes and wonky analyses have taught us enough to know one thing at least—the causes of the divisions behind the two votes were both partly economic and partly cultural.

‘Until social innovators adopt services and language that resonate with

communities beyond their comfort zone, they are alienating people from innovation’

The cultural aspect is evident in how Brexiteers come not only from economically ‘left behind’ areas of the north of England or the rust belt states in the US —they also include colonels from Hampshire and Daily Mail-reading housewives from Shropshire. Together, these are not the losers of globalisation but rather the voters most attached to family, flag, faith, and other traditional values. These are people more likely to respond with fear than excitement to Tony Blair’s famous description of how ‘the character of this changing world is indifferent to tradition. Unforgiving of frailty. No respecter of past reputations. It has no custom and practice. It is replete with opportunities, but they only go to those swift to adapt, slow to complain, open, willing and able to change.’ Shockingly for many of us, it turns out that some British people are slow to adapt, quick to grumble and reluctant to change. Who knew?

But we know the economics matter, too. The two votes were a surprise to many people, and the states and constituencies that voted against expectations were the losers of globalisation—areas with high unemployment and low productivity. It was the left behind wot won it.

So Brexit was forged and Trump carried to victory in those areas with economic challenges and more traditional cultural values. These voters surprised the pollsters and the metropolitan elite, as the ‘left behind’ turned away from the offer of liberal globalisation. Perhaps these swing voters could have been persuaded somehow? Perhaps they could have voted otherwise? What would have made the difference?

What does social innovation offer to the ‘left-behind’?
It seems safe to assume that genuinely transformative economic solutions that resonate with traditional values would surely have been a more enticing offer than the models presented by the UK’s social innovators over the last decade or so.

While whole communities in this country have been written off, ignored and battered by economic forces over the past decade, our self-styled social innovators have brought their privileged backgrounds and expensive educations to fashionable metropolitan lofts and repurposed warehouses.

They’ve huddled around largely useless and ineffective digital architecture, creative apps, hackathons, edible tech, programmable food and playable wearables, with only a quick game of air hockey or an overpriced craft beer for light relief. Over a decade and more, these labs and catapults have launched a barrage of economically not-very-transformative, not-very-solutions wrapped in a language of not-very-traditional values out into a largely baffled and indifferent country—to little effect.

The self-styled social innovation industry has not only failed to transform many lives, it has also failed to transform the conventional economic model it borrowed from Silicon Valley. Successive rounds of venture capital-style investment are required to grow and scale, glorifying the powerful investor, concentrating rewards, and doing nothing to spread wealth or mitigate increasing economic equality.

The American folk singer Tom Paxton once sang about the failure of industry to share the rewards of technology. ‘You know they got a machine where I used to stand, just as funny looking as can be, saying, “Sorry boys, but you gotta go”, that meant Jimmy and Billy and me. Well that machine is pretty and as fast as a devil and there’s just one thing that I see, you can bet the boss he didn’t take no loss, it was Jimmy and Billy and me.’

Until social innovators adopt economic models that actually share the proceeds of value creation, they are exacerbating, rather than mitigating economic inequality. Until they adopt products, services and language that resonate with communities beyond their comfort zone, they are alienating people from, rather than turning them on to innovation.

The idea that our models of social innovation do very little to reverse the concentration of economic capital is not a new insight and others have written about it before. Emanuele Ferragina, in particular, has suggested that, ‘social innovation might soon turn out to be simply another way to juxtapose the qualifier ‘social’ to the private sector jargon in order to avoid heated discussions on structural inequalities’.

Perhaps the anonymous writer who reviewed Social Innovators and Their Schemes in 1859 put it best: ‘The first and most universal characteristic of the social innovator is a profound ignorance, and often a violent abhorrence, of political economy.’

We need to focus on the good, not the new
As it happens, events in 2016 have seemingly disrupted some of the assumptions that social innovators have relied upon. As good liberal elites, social innovators never dared to really consider the scope for alternatives to our prevailing liberal capitalist version of globalisation. Yet we now have increasing recognition across the political spectrum that wealth and income inequality are existential threats to global economic stability.

There are serious question marks over free market capitalism’s ability to bypass environmental catastrophe. Even Davos Man admits to uncertainty around the sustainability of capitalism itself, after unprecedented bailouts, historically low interest rates, state intervention and quantitative easing. Meanwhile, we can’t ignore the relative growth and success of Chinese state capitalism in lifting hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. Challenges to equality, the environment, peace, economic stability, liberal values and democracy itself may now appear to be a feature of liberal capitalism, not a bug. These are not short-term, technical challenges to be ironed out with a few social innovations. The underlying structural conditions of our society are under threat.

So if social innovators do not redirect their efforts towards more transformative economic solutions that resonate with more traditional communities, they may find the sandblasted floorboards shifting beneath their feet. Who knows if they will appreciate the irony when cheaper, simpler, more convenient and truly transformative models of social innovation emerge from communities who really need them, disrupting the self-style social innovation industry from below.

By turning our attention to the good not the new, and value not novelty, we must work across the UK and beyond to overcome economic inequality and social division. We can develop models rooted in communities that are genuinely economically transformative. Models that are inclusive in terms of class and geography, as well as race and gender. Models built around fairness, decency and community, which not only support those who have fallen between the cracks, but also bridge social divides and help us develop mutual understanding. Innovator, disrupt thyself!

• This article was first published in the latest edition of Stir to Action themed on the Cult of Innovation