It is very tempting to talk about the unprecedented opportunities for
social innovation that have been opened up by the technologies of the digital
era. It is tempting to go further, to gaze upon Wikipedia with wonder and to
speculate how we can use the wiki approach to address a myriad of social
problems (how about new forms of Wiki government?). However, both
social innovation and digital technologies are hugely complex phenomena and any
exploration of the relationship between the two requires a more critical
perspective. Digital technologies can be considered as tools used to increase
the impact and scale of social innovation, but they are not merely tools. These
technologies even when used with the best of intentions create a subtle and
ever changing balance of positive and negative impacts. Consider the Grameen Bank
Village Phone programme which sought to empower women in deprived Bangledeshi
communities by providing them with the tools (mobile phones) to become
entrepreneurial microcredit brokers. Much debate remains
over the impacts of this initiative both positive, e.g. creating new employment
opportunities and improving the standing of women within their communities, and
negative e.g. the appropriation of the profits of the entrepreneurial activity
by men within the communities. Further complicating the picture, we live in a
world pervaded (or even invaded) by digital technologies, they are integral to
our day-to-day lives, they are embedded within the structures of society, and
so they shape the opportunities available to social innovators and
entrepreneurs. Digital technologies also directly create social needs which in
turn necessitate further social innovation, indeed we now know that we need
social innovations to help strike a better balance between the individual’s
right to privacy and state surveillance on the Internet. So how do we start to
deal with these complexities and move beyond the sense that digital social
innovation is a somewhat vague but rather exciting idea?
First, as a society we need to better navigate the middle ground between
techno-optimism and techno-phobia, to develop a more refined understanding of
the role of digital technologies in social innovation. So rather than
proclaiming that the data, captured by digital technologies, is “the 21st century’s new raw
material” which will catalyse the “innovation and enterprise that spurs social ...
growth”, policymakers could seek to understand and address the contradictory
impacts of digital social innovations. Instead of taking social problems as
given and applying technological tools to address them, technologists could
develop a deep understanding of the problem at hand. Accenture applied this
approach in Copenhagen, where they employed a team of local ethnographers to
understand the routines and lives of citizens before developing digital tools
to improve quality of life within the city. Whilst social innovators and
entrepreneurs could create spaces, such as Social Innovation
Labs, for people to share and explore visions of better ways to live in a
world pervade by digital technologies.
Secondly, we need to go to greater lengths to acknowledge and engage in
the politics of digital social innovation. The political nature of social
innovation is more readily apparent, as where innovation is orientated to
addressing a social need we implicitly or explicitly challenge established
interests, create conflicts, and call for redistribution of social and economic
resources. The politics of digital technologies more often remain unseen and
unquestioned in the form of values that are embedded within the design of these
technologies, for example the advertising sidebar in Facebook tells us much
about the efforts to monetise all aspects life. So where digital technologies
are involved in social innovations and are considered as solely as enabling
tools, we overlook some of the politics involved. We look for the positive in
the technology and overlook the potential downsides, and so run the risk of
pursuing an ill-fated technological fix to a political issue. Rather we could
be inspired by emerging digital social innovations which engage citizens in the
design and use of digital technologies to create more sustainable cities, such
as the Smart Citizen Toolkit and Open Energy Monitor. Acting on upon this
inspiration we could seek to democratise the politics of digital social
innovation by enabling citizens to participate in both its social and
technological aspects.
