From Technological to Social Innovation

Vienna.
The next session at Challenge Social Innovation 2011 is a plenary which begins with Uwe Schneidewind. he notes that we’re at the intersection of technological and social innovations, and technology still continues to drive things rather too much; but social innovation is gradually growing in importance. This is also because the marginal benefits of purely technological innovations – improving efficiency, for example – are declining, due to rebound effects: the relevant effects of technological innovations are quickly absorbed by the dynamics of the overall system.

Cost savings from cheaper lightbulbs are absorbed by the fact that cheaper costs lead people to use more of them, for example; the New Beetle is more fuel efficient than the old Beetle, but is also heavier and has more devices which require energy; biofuels may provide a sustainable fuel source, but also lead to significant agricultural changes and to further deforestation of rainforests being logged to create farmland.

Technological innovations no longer necessarily generate corresponding value, then. Expensive pharmaceuticals developed to provide marginal new benefits can no longer be afforded by health systems, for example, which have shifted their focus on providing affordable health care. Even in fields where we still have relevant effects of technological innovation, such as energy generation, achieving technological and infrastructure change is difficult – to promote such change, social rather than merely technological innovation is necessary.

Further, the performance of innovations needs to be understood. This raises tricky problems of speed: what innovations will generate change fast enough to achieve impact? Changing the energy infrastructure of an entire society through technological innovation will take several decades, for example – but following the Fukushima disaster, significant changes to energy policy have been effected rapidly in Japan (and Germany). Another example, Uwe says, is the relatively fast introduction of anti-smoking laws in many European countries.

Capital is needed to address many current challenges, of course. Social innovations, overall, are less capital-intensive, and instead require investment in knowledge, education, and other social areas; if today, 90% of European research funding is invested in technological innovation, then this may need to change. Further, there is a multitude of triggers here. Strong and consequential government policies are needed; where technological innovation can only be triggered by a handful of major stakeholders, social innovation is much more open to a wide range of participants, and policy must address these actors.

So, what must be done in social innovation research, perhaps especially in the sustainability area? Uwe suggests that there must be more and bigger laboratories: bigger spaces where the interaction of technological and social innovation can be observed, where innovations can spread out to new contexts. Urban settings – cities – are a highly effective form of these new experimental spaces: they provide a perfect ground for deeper research into social and cultural innovation, and we need new research and policy agendas that take these spaces into account, and engage in international comparisons.