Understanding the differences between commercial and social innovation | Part 2 of 2
Last year I shared the part one exploring the differences between commercial and social innovation. If you missed it, read it here.
While some goals overlap, commercial and social innovation often have very different goals. With different goals, we need to adjust our approach accordingly.
Assuming the same approach provides equal value and is equally fit for purpose across both contexts is problematic. In particular, when it comes to identifying how inequality is produced and reproduced, decolonising research, ensuring the psychological safety of those we’re working with and for, our cultural competency (or lack thereof) and the urgency of doing good, really well.
If we’re to roll-out the same toolbox to address very different kinds of problems (commercial problems often being linear with clear and discrete stakeholders, whilst social issues are often complex, wicked and diverse in their stakeholders), we run the risk of creating harm. Wasting time. Wasting money. Diminishing trust.
While it’s exciting to see a growing trend of designers and innovators applying their skills for good, we have to recognise where our skills and understanding start and end, as well as where our learning needs to take us if we’re to do good, well. Any designer ‘doing good’ must have a literacy for privilege (especially our own), disadvantage and trauma. Without it, we’re in real danger of repeating some of the harm of that those of the not-so-distant past created when they also set about ‘fixing’ people, countries and cultures.
In part one, I explored:
- Social innovation must confront disparity, there is no imperative for commercial innovation to do the same
- Social innovation relies on social capital and trust, we cannot easily buy trust or participation
- To develop communities and individuals, we must move beyond transactional methods for researching and collaborating
In this article, I look at:
- Collaborative design methods need adaption for trauma, low self-efficacy and psychological safety in a social innovation context
- When it comes to tackling social isolation, the innovation process can be an intervention in itself
- Innovation methods alone are insufficient in addressing complex issues
1. Collaborative design methods need adaptation for trauma, low self-efficacy and psychological safety when addressing social challenges
Often, collaborative design methods that work well in commercial innovation or in the growth of enterprises are applied to social challenges and the people affected by those challenges. Approaches such as group idea generation, focus groups and design sprints typically require participants:
- Feel their thoughts and ideas matter and are worth sharing
- Be socially connected to have heard about the opportunity
- Be willing and able to be vulnerable in front of others
- Err towards extroversion over introversion.
It’s hard to develop and share ideas when you’re not sure if you or your ideas matter. It’s also difficult to grow and share ideas, as well as share or hear critical feedback when we don’t feel safe. We need to feel safe in order to use the creative centre of our brains. When we feel unsafe, our biology hijacks our ability to be creative.
When involving customers in collaborative design activities in the commercial world, while participants may experience shyness or temporary discomfort (typically alleviated through skilled facilitation), there often isn’t a strong presence of trauma.
Trauma is “an event, series of events or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional or spiritual wellbeing” (SAMHSA, 2014, p. 7).
Trauma changes our brains neurobiology - who we are, how we are with others, how we move through the world. With social challenges, we often work with those who have experienced or are experiencing trauma, as well with people who have low self-image, self-belief and self-efficacy. In addition, that’s often paired with a long term orientated as passive recipient of services and supports (in contrast to active participants or valued partners).
For many of us, traumatised or not, we need space to find ourselves, to dwell in our questions, in what we’re noticing — until we can find and share new knowledge. We need spaces for different kinds of wisdom.
We cannot expect to find solutions to match the scale of the challenges we face unless we can carve out space and time for different kinds of participation (not only the most time efficient kinds).
What might a trauma-informed design practice look like?
In the transition from commercial to social innovation, we need to reflect on where collaborative design methods are and aren’t appropriate, as well as where our skills as designers and innovators start and end.
If we’re to work with, and hear from lived experience — we have to set up conditions for people to do so within their realities. I’m exploring how we might draw on trauma-informed care to shape a safer and more inclusive collaborative design practice. For example, through incorporating the following principles:
- Understanding the prevalence and impact of trauma
- Communication with compassion
- Recognising resilience
- Sharing of power
- Pursuing people’s strengths, choice and autonomy
- Earning trust and maintaining boundaries
- Promoting safety
- Prioritising empowerment and skill-building.
2. When it comes to tackling social isolation, the innovation process can be an intervention in itself
We know social connectedness is one of the major determinants of health and well-being. Depression and social isolation are closely linked, with social isolation both leading to and maintaining depression (Cruwys et al., 2014).
The startling health impacts of social isolation are well documented (akin to smoking 15 cigarettes a day), and weigh disproportionally on certain groups. Evidence suggests that roughly 20% of older adults are socially isolated in Australia (Beer et al., 2016).
Many commercial design methods see people as individual participants, through one-on-one activities (interviewing, testing), or discrete involvement in parts of the design process (e.g. in early research activities, in testing workshops, in a brainstorm session). Due to time and budget constraints, commercial innovation seldom uses approaches that see people with lived experience as active partners throughout a design process.
By contrast, participatory approaches can and should foster new relationships and strengthen existing ones through the shared sense of purpose of working on a challenge together. Doing so requires deeper involvement, such as the curation and use of a co-design team — whereby people both participate, and have their skills built to participate. Whilst there’s no strong imperative to use participatory or co-design methods in commercial innovation, in social innovation we’re aiming to share power, strengthen self-determination, as well as offer opportunities for people to grow their skills and relationships.
What if instead of looking at projects as a way to grow a solution, we also thought about the social innovation process as one approach to strengthening social connection?
My choice of participatory design methods to grow social connections are:
- Neighbourhood meals as a means of insight gathering, collective dreaming about the future, running ideation, prototyping and testing activities
- The formation of one or several co-design groups to run across the innovation process (typically made up of people with lived experience, professionals and external provocateurs)
- Creating and curating art exhibitions focused on the challenges and opportunities related to an issue (e.g. gender equity, alcohol harm)
- The use of peer-to-peer research methods (e.g. for insight gathering and testing ideas).
3. Innovation methods alone are insufficient in addressing complex issues
Commercial innovation methods work well to tackle tame and even complicated problems. In developing new products, improving and creating services, in the ideation and testing of business models. Most of the time, it’s adequate to have designers or innovator alongside a technical or content lead work on a solution.
By contrast, social innovation deals with complex and emergent challenges. Challenges often described as ‘wicked’. For example, poverty, domestic violence, abuse and neglect. Recognising the differences in complex and complicated problems is important, as the challenge we’re tackling should guide our approach. For example, in selecting the expertise we bring around the table, as well as the sense-making approaches we select.
If we’re looking to tackle challenges like place-based disadvantage, innovation and design methods are not enough, alone. While they help, no number of user journey maps or service blueprints will fully identify and articulate a solution to match the scale of the problem.
That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try, that we shouldn’t use our design toolbox — but it does mean we shouldn’t use our knowledge and tools alone. We need other disciplines, other kinds of wisdom, knowing and expertise. For example:
- Community development
- Policy
- Cultural competency
- Economics
- Behaviour change
- Social science
- Scaling
It’s common to find linear thinking from commercial innovation applied to tackling social challenges. Linear thinking, planning and doing from commercial innovation isn’t enough. In social change, change is often unpredictable, messy and emergent.
As practitioners, we’re all learning and un-learning about how to intervene in complex systems. To have a chance at success, we need to look beyond the boundaries of our organisations, and relax methodology dogma if we’re to address the scale of the challenges we face.
Summary
Innovation and design-led methods, while successful in many commercial contexts, are on their own inadequate in addressing complex and wicked social challenges.
What differences have you noticed? Where are the similarities? Where have efforts to apply commercial methods to social challenges been successful? Where have they failed? I’d love to know.
