231835 Resource 211112 212597 1 1242100800000 1253571371719 Controlled Government-Driven Social Innovation: Caution Advised

The White House wants money to help nonprofits spread innovations that work. Should social entrepreneurs embrace this idea?

In Spain last summer at a conference of social innovators from around the world, we were struck—and somewhat troubled—by the participants easy acceptance of their national government’s role in funding and guiding social innovation. Perhaps eight years with the Bush administration’s indifference and incompetence had left me concerned about government doing anything well, so why let it muck up my chosen field? Or maybe, a colleague noted, we were reacting to the very different contexts for funding social innovation in the U.S. and the rest of the world. Here we have large philanthropic assets and robust philanthropic institutions that provide most of the innovation capital. In the United Kingdom, on the other hand, the foundation sector is much, much smaller, we learned, and has a conservative approach. So innovators turn to government to provide resources. We put aside our concerns and looked forward to whatever a new Obama administration would propose to support social innovation. The wait ended last week, when the White House announced it wants to use $50 million of taxpayer funds as a <a title="Chronicle of Philanthropy article on social innovation fund" href="http://philanthropy.com/news/updates/8122/white-house-seeks-50-million-for-social-innovation">"social innovation fund"</a> to support replication of innovations that have demonstrated success. Melody Barnes, director of the president's Domestic Policy Council, provided details: “The Social Innovation Fund reflects the president’s new governing philosophy: finding and investing in what works; and partnering with and supporting others who are leading change in their communities.” There are several things to worry about here: <ul> <li>What is it that government will do better than the philanthropic community? The shortcomings of foundations are well known and deeply frustrating to many social innovators. In particular, the "capital markets" for social innovation are inefficient, idiosyncratic, slow, and non-strategic. But what will be gained from the federal government's $50 million? It's a pittance compared to foundation investment. Just a few weeks ago, the Ford Foundation committed that much funding to just one response to home-mortgage foreclosures. Government may be good at making policies and programs, but that's not the same as developing and spreading social innovations.   </li> <li>Picking and funding solutions to spread isn't a systemic response to the problem of scaling up social solutions.  To use a favorite metaphor of the philanthropic community, it sounds like the White House intends to feed fish (funding) to some nonprofits instead of teaching the nonprofit sector how to fish. In other words, the real problem that needs a solution is the difficulty that worthwhile social innovations have in reaching greater scale. But this requires a systemic solution, not some more "one off" cases. We've argued that <a title=""Accelerating Social Innovation in the U.S."" href="item/224612">foundations should be developing "enabling structures" for social innovation</a>, such as innovation production networks. Similarly, we have been looking at the lack of structures for "distributing" social innovations to communities. But there doesn't seem to be much that's systemic about a federal social innovation fund. </li> <li>How will government funding be politicized? Government money comes with government politics. Innovation is about pragmatic solutions, but any social solution on its way to greater scale is likely to require government policy changes, and/or irritate entrenched special interests that like the status quo, and/or trigger ideological disputes (e.g., market-based solutions vs. government program-based solutions). What's more, politicians rarely operate on the time-horizon of social innovation. They want results before the next election, while the social innovations we know have taken much longer than that--10 years or more in many cases--to achieve impressive scale of impact. As some foundations have learned, impatient funding can easily screw up, rather than scale up, a promising innovation. </li> </ul> So here's a modest proposal. At the risk of looking a gift horse in the mouth, it might be more useful to commit a small amount of resource like the $50 million to really understanding the "social innovation infrastructure" in the U.S. and what the smartest role is for the federal government to play in that infrastructure. Instead of focusing on a few opportunities to support the work of nonprofit innovators, why not look more systemically at how the federal government can change its own practices in ways that help social innovation? There are many means other than funding nonprofits for the federal government to spur innovation in the innovation sectors, such as <a title="An Innovation Laboratory for Workforce Development" href="/public/item/226696">workforce development</a>, education, and community development, in which it's a player. In our experience working with federal departments, most of them don't even understand the concept of social innovation, much less the tools they could use to advance it. So why not use the $50 million to create an across-the-board social innovation strategy for the federal government--leveraging the existing massive resources at play in the federal budget to advance innovation in multiple sectors simulatenously?    10 application/xml false Obama social innovation project:building the social innovation field project:social innovation discipline social innovation social innovation fund White House Office of Social Innovation Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0; .NET CLR 1.0.3705; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; Media Center PC 4.0; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Zune 3.0; .NET CLR 3.0.4506.2152; .NET CLR 3.5.30729) 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 $Admin 173.160.40.189 false true false false true 218442 false false true false false false true 232356 Resource 218442 173239 212597 1242667468602 1242676316399 Controlled RE: Government-Driven Social Innovation: Caution Advised

what about investing through existing funds?

Gentlemen, Thanks for your thoughtful post. It's easy enough to think "cool," Obama and Co finally want to help us. I'd like to know more about how they plan to spend the money (any deeper insight here?) Would you recommend they put some federal funds into existing foundations to amplify those activities? How would you run the fund if they asked for your advice? 10 application/xml false Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.10) Gecko/2009042315 Firefox/3.0.10 127.0.0.1 127.0.0.1 gregberry 67.177.195.88 false true false false true 211112 blog blogsite/INC/my-weblog-view