A few years ago I wrote about the rise of social innovation labs that are attempting to promote change and innovation in a variety of ways. Social innovation labs are designed to bring together a diverse group of people and opinions to try and tackle some of the more challenging and complex problems we face. They tend to do this via the creation of prototype solutions that are tested in the real world, before then being continuously improved.
Each lab tries to take a systemic approach to the task, going beyond looking at symptoms and parts to try and get to the root cause of why things are currently not working.
A new paper from the Cambridge Judge Business School highlights a number of key characteristics of social innovation labs that help distinguish them from other forms of innovation.
“(Social innovation) labs create a process that harvests the individual’s expertise and experience of being part of the system it aims to innovate,” the paper says. “In order for this process to take place…it is important to build a safe space for collaborating.”
Three ways social innovation labs stand out
- Time to let ideas develop – whilst the innovation can be rapid and experimental, the systemic nature of the labs means that participants focus on the long-term and give ideas time to germinate.
- Learning techniques – including dialogue interviews, democracy of time and learning journeys. These provide stakeholders with a number of ways to contribute to the process and make the collective smarter.
- Generating and testing ideas – with a range of tools to support this, such as transformative scenarios, which ask participants to imagine the best and worst scenarios for the future.
Despite the growing popularity of social innovation labs, there has been relatively little academic exploration of the field, so the paper is a welcome contribution to the dialogue.
