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I represent the Waterloo Institute for Social
Innovation and Resilience, which is at the
University of Waterloo.
And what I'm going to try to do, just in the next 15, 20
minutes is to actually look a little bit at the kind of rich
veins of theory and practise that have been developing in
different parts of the world and try to go slightly below
the surface in the work we've been doing at Waterloo's
Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience.
So as most of you will be familiar with Steven Johnson's
notion about where good ideas come from.
And he and Brian Arthur, who also wrote a book on The
Nature of Technology, have chosen to take the complexity
lens to look at how ideas emerge.
And they argue that, within that complexity framework, we
are dealing with emergence.
We're also dealing with the bricolage, the piecing
together of old ideas into new forms, and have tried to
understand how that happens.
We need to look at the notion of the adjacent possible.
Those ideas or things or inventions that are separate
but associated, close to us, in proximity to us, and how
those actually combine and recombine to
move towards the future.
So when I look back, as Laura was talking about, from my
perspective, on what are those building blocks, what are the
adjacent possible that has shaped where we're going
today, I see a number of such building blocks.
I see management business school theories, which I spent
a number of years at McGill in the business school.
I see work in sociology, both social movements and some of
the basic, theoretical frameworks of Anthony Gibbons
and the notion of cross-scale interactions.
I see a good bit of complexity theory.
And I also see some kinds of system ecology.
And these have come up, these different frameworks have
produced a number of other related frameworks.
So in the business management schools, you have corporate
social responsibility and entrepreneurship, innovation
theory, strategy process, leadership.
All domains in which there are established research
traditions.
You also see the system ecology producing a great deal
of knowledge about how complex, adaptive systems work
and the ways in which resilience, as a particular
piece of complexity theory, allows us to understand phases
and stages of resilient systems, which include and
actually integrate some of the innovation theory of
Schumpeter and the notion of adaptive cycle
and infinity loops.
Finally, there's been considerable work around
complexity management and leadership, which brings
together some of those complexity paradigms with the
rest of the business thinkers.
So these are the ones that I, personally, have experienced
and encountered and a few of our thinking.
There are probably more.
I mean one of the exciting things about bringing together
this particular group of people is that we can dig down
and look at what are those paradigms and epistemologies
that are underpinning our work.
There's a rich set of ideas out there that we're using and
we're combining and, in fact, have deep roots.
So although social innovation isn't really a field yet, it's
a set of interests and foci.
It is deeply grounded.
And I think that's an important thing to remember.
So within that, I can think of four or five different areas
where people have been working, social
entrepreneurship, social enterprise, drawing on
corporate social responsibility and
entrepreneurship, innovation process, drawing on innovation
theory and strategy process, institutional
entrepreneurship, coming out of complexity management,
leadership, and also complexity theory, as well as
some of the sociological cross-scale analysis theories,
socio-technical transitions and multiscale interactions,
social ecological transformations.
And all of these, I think--
and again, I don't want to limit it to that.
Because I think there are potentially other schools of
thought, some of the thinking, certainly, that's going on now
around design thinking, design labs.
We're working also on social innovation labs.
And Nesta is working on that approach.
They also contribute to that.
But I think of these as major building blocks, those five.
And they're also associated with a number of centres, who
are represented here.
And this is by no means conclusive.
But these are ones that I personally have interacted
with and collaborated with, Skoll, Nesta, STEPS and DRIFT,
stuff for the Brazilian Centre, and [INAUDIBLE].
There are obviously others here, some of which are very
established, CRISES coming out of Montreal, the Bertha Centre
in South Africa, a number of emergent centres in Europe,
which I think are going to be accelerated by
these big EU grants.
So they exist.
And they work separately.
And we've started to exchange.
This may be the first time everyone, with the exception
of Stockholm Resilience Centre-- but I sort of think I
can represent them as well.
And [INAUDIBLE] has worked with them as well.
A great deal are here in the room.
So it represents these building blocks that we can
think about bringing together.
Now WISeR, obviously, is situating itself in that
institutional entrepreneurship innovation space,
socio-technical transitions, socio-ecological transitions.
So we're taking a fairly broad perspective and a complexity
perspective.
Our definition--
and we know that definitions abound--
is changing the system dynamics that created the
problem in the first place.
So we say that social innovation is any initiative,
product, process, programme, project, or platform that
challenges and, over time, contributes to changing the
defining routines, resources, and authority flows or beliefs
of the broader social system in which it's introduced.
So successful social innovations have durability,
scale, and transformative impact.
And I want to really underline that this definition is not
either superior or inferior to any of others
that are out there.
It's just the definition that comes from the kind of
epistemology and approach of the researchers who are
working there.
So it causes us to look at certain parts of the dynamic
and process, to privilege certain approaches or lenses
in exploring it.
And I believe that there are others out there that are
building equally valid insights, with other
definitions.
And so we don't really want to get into struggling about
which definition is correct.
I think this is the time to begin to think across them.
So at WISeR, because of that approach, we've got a number
of research projects that are going on.
One of our first set of projects, which were
case-based, qualitative work, were really looking at
institutional entrepreneurs and the process of complex
system change.
We drew heavily on innovation process frameworks
in looking at this.
So as many of you know, who are in that field, there's a
focus, in large, complex organisations that are
continuously innovating, about the role of a certain set of
actors in that process, who are able to question what is
termed the strategic apex and frame what they see there, the
opportunities, which are happening at that level, for
people who are working much more at the coal face of the
front lines, but then to identify and sell innovations
that fit with strategic opportunities in the
organisation.
And they represent a key ingredient in the
transformation process, in attaching good ideas into
opportunities.
Now, when you move that into the social domain, you get
increased complexity, obviously.
You have political systems, economic systems, culture
systems, legal systems, ala Gittens, really existing at an
institutional level.
And you have innovations or inventions occurring in
organisations, in communities, but again, in a sense, at the
coal face, where work needs to be done.
But you also see these pivotal figures, in addition to social
entrepreneurs, who act to make these connections, to connect
the resource of a new idea with an opportunity that's
happening at a broader institutional context.
So we've done a fair amount of work and developed that.
And part of that, as we looked across organisations and
systems where we were seeing change happen, has resulted in
us spending quite a bit of time focusing on what we see
as the difference between scaling out and scaling up.
So scaling out really means, for us, the movement of an
idea across different organisations, different
communities, different individuals.
It's, in a sense, somewhat related to the notion of
diffusion innovation, that you actually
get the idea to spread.
But one of the things that we began to see, looking at
institutional entrepreneurs, that that was necessary, but
not sufficient.
So many efforts to scale out did not result in system
transformation.
That tended, in some ways, to overload the social
entrepreneurs who were trying to do it.
And then you would see this phenomenon, which in social
ecological transformation they call remembrance, where the
broader system actually pushes that innovation back into a
conformity spot.
And you don't see the transformation.
So we began to see, in looking at a number of different
organisations, that there was a point where most social
entrepreneurs actually felt like they either had to
connect to or become institutional entrepreneurs or
system entrepreneurs.
They had to switch gears, because they were frustrated
by the limits of scaling out.
Now that didn't necessarily happen in that sort of
sequential way I'm describing it.
In many cases, people are working at all
scales at the same time.
But these skills, for scaling out and scaling up, are
somewhat different.
And so it's not necessarily the same
people that can do both.
So we found that a useful distinction and an important
one for trying to look, again--
remembering what our definition of a social
innovation is--
trying to understand how that broad transformation happens.
Partly based on that particular work and some of
the insights that we gained from that work, about the ways
in which the starting conditions of the founding
organisation or invention were fairly prophetic in terms of
the pathway it needed to take as it scaled up and also
discovering that, in many cases, the very strength of
the idea turned into a weakness when you tried to
scale it up.
So the very precision of a particular programme, when you
tried to actually position it in a much broader system,
meant that there was a sort of rigidity, where they needed to
hybridise it to some extent but couldn't
necessarily do it.
Or the very broadness, in another case, of multiple,
multiple ideas and being stimulated by, say, a
membership group, actually risked losing some of that
base, because, in order to scale up, you had to focus it
in order to sell it to the next level.
So those kind of insights actually made us think, well,
what would happen if we took a much longer frame?
And I should mention that this particular project, if you
want to hear more about it, we do have another paper, that
Nino Antadze's doing, where she's going to dive much more
closely into that project.
So we move then to this broader, historical frame.
And you're not going to be able to see this at all.
But these are a set of kind of Pressy-like that I've just cut
and pasted here, in which we are making an
effort, over time.
This is the internet, the case of the internet, which is
actually the shortest one we're looking at.
Because we're looking at things like female
contraception.
We're looking at national park system in the US.
We looking at derivatives and derivative markets.
We're looking at partnerships.
We're looking at Aboriginal schools.
We're hoping to look at mass education.
That are very, in fact, established.
And we want to do two things in taking this historical
perspective.
We wanted to go back to the Brian Arthur and Steven
Johnson hypothesis that good ideas, initially, start with a
kind of breakthrough, a new way of looking at things.
In technology, it was often a scientific breakthrough.
We felt that, in the social realm-- we had discussions
with both them--
this is often a political philosophy or a new idea.
So we wanted to take ones that clearly had succeeded in
transformation, track it back in part to see whether there
was, we could identify such an idea but also looking at our
enduring preoccupations about the adjacent possible and the
role of agency.
And some of the stuff that's coming out, which is
fascinating, is, as you'll see, those blue lines are
essentially adjacent possible.
There is a lot of parallel things coming on that weave in
and out of an innovation over time.
Where the I's are, if you can see those, those are when we
clearly can see agency.
And we can see, over time, for a really successful
innovation, that agency has to be passed
on a number of times.
We also see new ideas, that are light bulbs,
coming in to shape it.
But interestingly enough, we'll often see that the
starting conditions in these cases, even after several
hundred years, are also prophetic.
So it reminds you of Weber and the notion of the iron cage.
For example, in the internet, the founding organisation,
which was ARPANET, was actually set up during the
'60s and the anti-Civil War society, with this notion or
approach that was predominent in the US then, even though it
was set up within the Army.
And it had this ethos of actually making everything
free and equal and not allowing bureaucracy or the
man to come in control things.
And even now, some 40, 50 years later, we're seeing that
same ethos in some of the debates about WikiLeaks, et
cetera, about where it is.
So we found this across all of them, that there were certain
enduring characteristics.
Again, we have another presentation, Katherine
McGowan is going dig in somewhat more deeply to this
if you're interested in looking at this.
So of course, across these-- and I'm
nearly done here, now--
different projects, we've had to grapple with methodology.
And that always comes up, right, when you're truly
trying to consolidate a research domain, starting from
all these different approaches.
And after considerable struggle, we found ourselves
joining with a lot of emerging work, in complexity paradigms,
about how one kind of approach just doesn't cut it for very
complex problems.
And we held a workshop where we brought a lot of those
folks together and came up with this model, where we felt
that there was a constant movement, back and forth,
between the notion of expert driven research and,
obviously, participatory research, action research.
Then a process of abstract generalisation, theory
building, model building, and statistical models, model
testing, and understanding the case-based, concrete
understanding of things that are unfolding.
And you may locate yourself at any one of those when you
start, but chances are that you're going to
move around in it.
So just describing what we did, we began with case-based
research, moved into some grounded theory, moved into a
number of practise contexts, where we're working in our
local area and helping agencies and groups to
accelerate.
They'd understand what's happening.
And then back to cases again, as we're doing
this historical case.
And the last one that I want to speak to you about is the
notion of starting, really, a social innovation database.
And we've been inspired by work that's going on at the
Stockholm Resilience Centre, where they formed a web based
database on regimes shifts, a key piece in understanding how
systems transform.
And what they did, through all this case-based work, they
created a whole set of variables.
And they posted that.
And the invitation is for people, working all over the
world, to come in and to formulate their cases so that
they fit into that particular model.
And then this database is open.
And people can begin to look at cross cases.
I think we're nearly there.
From our perspective of the work we've done, these are
some of the variables that we think are important.
What I'm partly hoping is that, out of this particular
workshop, we will be challenged in those and add to
those and refine those.
But if we can establish that kind of thing, we can begin to
find a platform where we can put all our work together.
And I think the time is ripe for that.
So finally, I think we all hunger for that the simplicity
on the other side of complexity.
When we're in an emerging field like this, we look for
the consolidation.
But I would partly urge us not to move too quickly on that.
When you think about that notion of the adjacent
possible, I think we're actually right where we need
to be at this point.
We have multiple, rich source disciplines.
We have well developed thematic areas that we've been
working in.
We're coming together in a workshop like this to find a
way to exchange and learn about that.
And we have practitioners, here, too, because most of us
move back and forth from theory to practise.
This is because, ultimately, I think we're all infused by a
very similar ethos.
We're unusual in the research community in that sense.
Because we do want to understand.
We do want to illuminate.
But we go into this area partly because we would like
to see those kinds of transformations happen.
We'd like to see, in a sense, small p transformations that
happen without big politics, that happen without revolution
in the streets, but that happen in an urgent and
immediate way.
Because we feel that many of the broad systems that we're
looking at are broken.
I think we have a real chance to do this in a
workshop like this.
We can really accelerate.
We can leap forward, in a sense, in terms of our
understanding.
And I think it really just depends on us continuing to be
open, for a little while longer, engaging each other's
epistemologies, really trying to understand how that relates
to our own, not getting captured in methodological
orthodoxy, which has plagued so many disciplines.
But remember that in a sense, we're part of an enterprise
that's larger than research itself, but I think gives
research a profound and fundamental purpose.
So thanks very much.
[APPLAUSE]