At the Innovation Network for Communities we're designing a solution--a Social Innovation Commons--for a problem all too familiar to social innovators and funders. Here's the problem statement:

Probably every social innovator or innovation investor/funder has had this experience: A problem or an opportunity needs to be addressed. How do you find out what has been tried, what worked and under what conditions, and how much it cost? Or, if a new idea needs to be checked out: How do you find out if it’s a good idea, if it has been tried before, if it is similar to other ideas?

Thus begins the search for social innovation information: What’s been written about this? What’s on the Internet? Who are the experts? What do they say? And, as the search piles up the information, another question arises: How to make sense of the hodge-podge of information? Some is in the form of a marketing pitch based on the innovators’ claims of success; or long detailed reports and full-length books that may or may not be worth reading; or Web pages and documents that aren’t really on target. Not to mention the fact that each “chunk” of information has its own formatting, few are searchable, and—most important—they employ differing “performance standards” for the innovations, or no standard at all.

In short, even though there is a large amount of information “out there,” a search for usable information usually leads to confusion and frustration. And even when it is successful, it requires a tremendous amount of labor in the face of great uncertainty of success—a risk that dampens enthusiasm for the task—as well as a high degree of judgment in sorting through the information.

In response, social innovators and philanthropic funders and private investors in social innovations cope in various ways. Those who can afford to, such as organized philanthropies or large nonprofits, undertake costly information searches to develop their strategies and ideas; they fund staff or turn to outside experts to develop the information they need. The rest either engage in low-cost searches, finding what’s easy to find and using, rejecting, or adapting it without much comparative information or analysis, or they patch together a more disciplined and costly search that starts and continues as resources allow, but is slower than desired. In other words, rampant inefficiencies in the information market for social innovation create debilitating costs and low speed of development.

This almost unsolvable “information maze” is a universal obstacle to accelerating the development and spread of effective social innovations. In the “age of information” it is a notable breakdown in the field of social innovation, a missing but fundamental “decision-support” capacity for the field’s development.

Click here to see our initial concept for a Social Innovation Commons.