Guardian: European Commission attention is growing on people-centred innovation!

There is a new trend focused on Social Innovation in the European Commission. According to the Guardian, EC attention is now growing around people-centred innovation, which creates a participatory, practice-based process to find sustainable new strategies for a socially and sustainable future.

There is a new trend focused on Social Innovation in the European Commission. According to the Guardian, EC attention is now growing around people-centred innovation, which creates a participatory, practice-based process to find sustainable new strategies for a socially and sustainable future.

This approach has been given impetus by a paper from the European Union’s think tank on Empowering people, driving change – social innovation in the European Union, which said “the long-held belief that economic growth creates employment and wealth that goes on to alleviate poverty has been disproved by recent events, and the time has now come to try new ways of bringing people out of poverty and promoting growth and well-being not only for, but also with citizens”.

As a result, the European Commission is looking wider than the usual suspects of governments and traditional institutions, to solve problems and is reaching out to work with social entrepreneurs, designers, active citizens and other change makers. This is quite a daunting task because these unusual suspects are often far from Brussels and not very interested in EU policies. Moreover, social innovation is by nature experimental, cross cutting, collaborative and dispersed. Social innovators are comfortable working with uncertainty, without blueprints, roadmaps or clear-cut business plans. Not a great fit with the bureaucratic culture of the EC which is risk averse, focused on financial control and keen on projected outputs. Two distinct worlds, that do not mingle well. It means that social Innovation requires innovation in the social model of the EU itself.

(Source: Guardian)