Philadelphia Social Innovations Journal and the Philadelphia Social Innovations Lab: Taking Ideas from Inception to Impact

Abstract

Introduction

While the desire to create social change was once unique to the public sector, entrepreneurs of various backgrounds are now more focused on how their organizations and actions impact the world around them. The emerging social economy is marked by the central importance of innovation as a driver. Social innovators, change makers, and social entrepreneurs, social enterprises, and social ventures are all in the business of identifying, shaping, and harnessing opportunities for social change, the “triple bottom line” strategy of a focus on social and environmental capital rather than a focus on financial gain. As “change agents,” social entrepreneurs are motivated by long-term social returns on investment (SROIs):

In its broadest definition, Social Investment is defined as the inputs necessary to fuel and power long term and sustaining social change. It can take the form of the financial investments necessary to fund testing and experimentation, the talent to provide the skills and expertise to execute the strategy, and the social networks to build coalitions to accomplish long lasting change (Nicholls 2008, 11).

Traditional nonprofits, outsmarted in many instances by the new class of social enterprises, are beginning to rethink their model: learning from social entrepreneurship, they now embrace project-driven goals over abstract missions, impact measuring to test and verify results, more dynamic organizations responsive to changing conditions, and more flexible business structures, including hybrids of non- and for-profit. Social innovation is now so central a concept that President Obama established the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, with a $124 million Social Innovation Fund, as one of his first acts in office. Indeed, the social economy is so dominant that companies are rushing to keep up: “[T]he openness for and proportion of changemakers in an organisation [sic] now defines competitiveness…. Consequently, much like organisations [sic] need a business model to attract investors, they increasingly need a ‘social model,’ a reason why people should want to engage with them” (Oldenburg 2012).

New models for working across sector and organizational silos are needed to develop robust cooperation and collaboration, key not just to improving outcomes, but also to developing more transformative innovations. As this dynamic plays out, it will become increasing important that charitable dollars are used in a way that produces real and tangible results, platforms for knowledge gathering and sharing are established, and models of “co-design” and “co-implementation” are formed (alliances, mergers, cooperatives, partnerships, exchanges, networks, affiliations, and so on). As the sector grows and consolidates, it needs service organizations, which, while already prolific, are as yet untested themselves, fragmented, and lacking clear protocols, methods, metrics, and case studies, just as the emerging social economy itself suffers. A window of opportunity exists to develop robust intermediaries dedicated to fostering and developing innovative ideas. The Philadelphia Social Innovations Lab has been created in conjunction with Philadelphia Social Innovations Journal, the Fels Institute of Government, Wharton Social Impact, and PennDesign to fill this void.