Social Innovation

It's valuable, rewarding, and selfless to do social innovation. Earlier this year, I participated in a social innovation workshop for an organization called Design for America (DFA). This organization teaches students several tools that can be used to improve a community and encourages them to build solutions.

In the workshop, teams were assigned, social problems were discussed, ideas were generated, and implementable solutions were designed. The final deliverable was a mock prototype and a performance on how this prototype would work in real life. It was a lot of fun because even if you don't develop your solution, it's documented so that others can carry on.

The problems dealt with on this workshop were ones that affect the elderly; financials for people with Alzheimer's, prescription confusion, loneliness, and (the one I worked with) monitoring health without impacting lifestyle. What made this workshop great? DFA folks have their innovation principles down, I saw the following in action:

• Strong mentorship: design experts, faculty members, and other students answered our questions.
• Low-stakes environment: teams were setup at random, you aren't forced to do anything, failure is only a learning experience.
• Significance: what you did meant something to someone and you knew it.
• Teamwork: it's gratifying to see how big ideas can grow when you throw them around a team. Nobody would get more or less rewarded from our results.
• Freedom: you could say whatever you wanted - the "significance" or importance of your project keeps the team on track.
• Clear milestones: throughout the workshop, there were deliverables with deadline. Every few minutes, for 1.5-2 hours, something had to be delivered.
• Fun: the workshop wasn't fun because it had low stakes, teamwork, and mentorship. It was a challenge, had a clear purpose and milestones, and it could positively affect people. You also had enough mentorship not to get stuck, you got to interact with people, and you had creative freedom. It hardly exists without the other 6 attributes, but you need something special to ensure fun.

Does this sound rewarding? Notice how these conditions would make for a great innovation environment AT WORK? Except that at least one of these conditions is often not present at work; we often encounter bad leaders, high stakes (career threats/opportunities), low significance (no meaning, just $$$), "teamwork" with a lot of "I"s (personal agendas, pet projects), no freedom, and/or changing scopes and expectations.

It might seem like this social innovation has different challenges but in reality they are the same. You use the same tools, you engage your innovators in the same way, and the results can be equally powerful. You can change the world by saving money, but you can also change it by improving lives; your values and needs should dictate what you do.