Our Civic Innovation Mission
A conceptual framework
A recap of our missions program
In 2021 we integrated a mission-led approach into our work, choosing three focus areas for our initial cycle of research and development — circular economy, impact finance, and civic innovation. Mission-led approaches are often deployed in response to ‘grand challenges’ which no single entity, discipline or stakeholder group can address on their own.
As an innovation Centre, we are committed to experimenting with new and complexity-informed approaches to advancing our goal to accelerate transition to a regenerative and distributive economy by growing knowledge and capability. We have identified that, for us in our work, a mission-led approach provides:
A valuable sensemaking framework, that can enable diverse and distributed stakeholders to align their efforts around complex goals and experiment with new approaches; including around navigating relationships between ‘means and ends’ (i.e. how the processes, practices and values we adopt shape our goals, whilst also generating the contextual framing needed to progress towards them).
Our orientation to mission-led work is a little different to comparable approaches in this field, in that we’ve chosen to focus on ‘demonstration’ impact projects that address real-world challenges. These projects will be delivered in collaboration with industry, civil society and public sector partners and our aim is to generate practical improvements in results, practice, knowledge and relationships.
Within our mission-focus we are also intentionally seeking to contribute to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and we will be designing and deepening our approach to this aspect over time.
We are designing our mission program to incorporate three interdependent activity levels — mission, program and project. At each of these levels we are aiming to:
- take an active stewardship role
- advocate for promising pathways towards regenerative futures
- push back against narratives that could be damaging to these emerging approaches.
Read more on our framing and how we are approaching this strand of our work.
Our CIVIC INNOVATION research and development mission
“Any viable future needs to framed about rebuilding and re-expanding the role of citizen beyond the provision and capacity of labour, consumption and the vote — embracing the civic agency, capacity and participation of citizens” (Johar, 2017).
Achieving massive, global goals such as the SDGs will require an extraordinary unlocking of latent innovation potential within and across society, and especially amongst citizens and civic institutions. Countries, cities and regions will need to harness and mobilise the knowledge, skills, networks, and motivation within communities in order to innovate towards more regenerative and distributive futures.
Innovation has been widely recognised as crucial to economic growth. Equally, innovation has enhanced well-being, inclusion and sustainability in our communities and societies — and citizens have played a large role in such innovation.
Innovation is about more than ‘new technologies’ the latest gadget or app, and it exists beyond the realm of commerce and economics. Innovation is just as critical in public and social sectors — and increasingly it is clear that citizens — people, families, communities — not only have the capacity to innovate but are and will be a critical part of innovation which leads to better outcomes and better futures for people, place and planet.
Our Framing of Civic Innovation
‘Civic Innovation’ is the way innovation is applied by citizens, communities, neighourhoods — to address challenges they identify or to transform their lives. Too often citizens have been relegated to the status of ‘consumers’ or ‘users’ of innovations. Civic innovation focusses on citizens as innovators in their own lives, in communities, in society and in creating positive, regenerative futures.
Civic Innovation is about citizens inventing, making and creating better futures in place and with others. A more technical definition might be:
The development of new or better methods, processes, systems or technologies by citizens to:
- address challenges or harness opportunities for creating better futures;
- positively influence or transform systems that impact their lives; and/or
- build connections to others, to place or to culture.
Civic innovation is an umbrella term that collects under it a myriad of practices, focus areas and actors. Some of the diverse practices that sit under this umbrella are outlined in the boxes here.
The ‘innovation’ part of the concept is about both the intent and the approach. The intent is around change — to ‘do better’ or to transform structures, processes, systems; but also to transform ourselves, our relationships, our places, our societies. Most approaches under the civic innovation umbrella focus on working with others — other citizens, collaborations with institutions, governments or businesses. The innovation process involves people ‘learning’ together — testing, experimenting, iterating in order to find out what works to support the outcomes they envision.
The ‘civic’ part refers to who does the innovativing and who benefits from it — the fact that it is people, citizens, communities and neighbourhoods who are driving, leading and benefitting from the innovation. ‘Civic’ has also been used to refer to geography — with citizens innovating in cities, towns, regions or neighbourhoods, so there is definitely a sense that place plays a key role (but this is more self-determined rather than imposed). It is also used to refer to a realm or domain of action whereby the innovation happens in public and is an open & shared process within but also across geographies.
Though there is a real emphasis on citizens driving or leading innovation, this is not in isolation from other actors or institutions, with many civic innovation initiatives actively involving or being supported by either or both government and business sectors. What is clear in civic innovation however is that citizens are in the drivers seat and actively setting the direction. Power dynamics (also sometimes referred to as ‘social relations’) are not only on the table for discussion, shifting them is core to the innovation process itself.
This does not mean, however, that citizens always drive the process in the same way nor that innovation always starts from communities alone. There are always contexts and circumstances that mean civic innovation needs support or resourcing from allies, partners or co-producers. Real change cannot involve just bottom-up nor top-down innovations. It requires collaboration at various stages, and it thrives when there the conditions are actively created and nurtured for diverse participation.
Figure Two outlines many of the ways citizens are and can be connected with civic innovation (though they may or may not be connected to all of these in all situations!).
Why is Civic Innovation important?
Recognising and actually fostering civic innovation breathes new life into the place of civil society in creating democratic, inclusive and sustainable futures.
As we face challenges like global pandemics, climate change, resulting catastrophic disasters like fires and floods, and growing social inequality, we see both the cracks in systems that are meant to ‘cushion’ effects, but also the innovative responses citizens and communities have that not only offer alternatives, but actually demonstrate possibilities for new ways of doing things.
Further, for a growing number of people it is clear that things like welfare and service systems just are not creating the outcomes they promised. Without at least, the active engagement or at best, the co-creation and production of new approaches, just tweaking these systems at the edges has not led to any real changes despite many costly reforms and enquiries.
Civic innovation is an umbrella term that draws together new and existing methods and approaches that focus on the reality and potentiality of citizens playing a crucial role in the creation, design, development and production of new and better outcomes for people, places and the planet.
The framing as ‘innovation’ points to both the need for some fundamental shifts in how we position citizens (away from recipients or ‘users’ of innovation to co-producers of innovation); and the potential for utilising new technologies (hard and soft) for harnessing civic participation in the creation of positive futures.
There is much talk about building the ‘resilience’ of citizens. We suggest that the framing of innovation outlined here offers an alternative positioning around active involvement in developing adaptive responses.
Civic Innovation: Back to the Futures
Even if the term may seem to be, the concept and practice of civic innovation is not new. There is a long and rich history across the world of citizens and communities leading the way in progressive movements that seek to usher in new ways of working, organising, resourcing and sharing. From mutual aid movements to cooperatives and sharing cultures, this is a movement that is as old as humanity. This current iteration is diverse — covering sectors and systems ranging from increasing participation, to new citizen-led visions of the welfare state, to well-being initatives, deliberative democracy initiatives and the ‘real’ sharing economy.
Perhaps what has shifted in the current context is the global visibility of the innovations that are emerging out of communities and the power of technology to build networks amongst citizens and between citizens and institutions (whether state or private sector).
Our Approach
At The Yunus Centre we are interested in civic innovation because we believe that citizens, communities, local businesses and local organisations play a critical part in driving innovation in places and regions.
Yet such innovation initiatives still often remain hidden in a field that is dominated by techpreneurs and commercial interests. We are seeking to highlight the role and importance of civic innovation and explore what this might mean in our local context, but also in contexts outside the dense centres of population where civic innovation has predominantly been examined.
This is a field where practice leads theory, and there is relatively little practice-based evidence or academic research that has focussed on understanding or exploring civic innovation (perhaps with the exception of specific methods such as deliberative democracy and sharing economies).
Through this work we are seeking to grow the practice and theory of this field and in so doing, demonstrate how it can benefit the local community in which The Yunus Centre sits.
We are particularly interested to examine what foundations could better support and enable the development of civic innovation, and what the role of public institutions such as universities, local businesses, services or government could be in helping to generate these foundations.
The Yunus Centre civic innovation mission therefore aims to contribute to this field in three ways:
- Field Building: mapping, uncovering, making visible the nature and contribution of civic innovation both in our local context, but also more broadly in helping us to transition to new economies;
- Experimentation: actively testing what and how we could contribute to growing ecosystems for civic innovation (Figure 4 provides an overview of what various practitioners and researchers in the field of civic innovation have identified as key to growing ecosystems of civic innovation — see for example, Britton et al, 2019 and 2020; Chen et al., 2020);
- Patterns: Understanding the emerging patterns through which civic innovation is contributing to shifting systems that are currently not working to generate the best outcomes for people and communities.
How we are undertaking this work is outlined in the boxes below. Our impact map for the civic innovation mission is presented on the final page of the pdf version of this post.
To connect with us around our Civic Innovation mission please contact Professor Ingrid Burkett
References:
Britton, T. And Participatory Cities Research Team (2019). Made to Measure: Year 1 Report, Participatory Cities Foundation, available at: http://www.participatorycity.org/tools-to-act
Britton, T. And Participatory Cities Research Team (2019). Tools to Act, Participatory Cities Foundation, available at: http://www.participatorycity.org/tools-to-act
Britton, T. And Participatory Cities Research Team (2020). Designed to Scale, Participatory Cities Foundation, available at: http://www.participatorycity.org/tools-to-act
Chen, J., Han, L. And Qu, G. (2020) Citizen Innovation: Exploring the Responsibility Governance and Cooperative Mode of a ‘Post-Schumpeter’ Paradigm, in Open Innovation, vol 6, 172, pp1–11
Finidori, H., Henfrey, T. and Borghini, S. (2015) Towards a Fourth Generation Pattern Language: Patterns as Epistemic Threads for Systemic Orientation, Proceedings of the Purplsoc (Pursuit of Pattern Languages for Societal Change) Conference July 2015 at Danube University Krems, Austria
Finidori, H. (2018) Configuring Patterns & Pattern Languages
for Systemic Design, Proceedings of PUARL — Future of Pattern Languages, University of Oregon — Portland — October 2018
Hyysalo, S. (2021). Citizen Activities in Energy Transition: User Innovation, New Communities, and the Shaping of a Sustainable Future, Routledge, London
Johar, I. (2017) It’s time to rediscover Homo Cívica, article published for Civil Society Futures inquiry, available at: https://civilsocietyfutures.org/time-rediscover-homo-civica/
Smith, Al and Stirling, A. (2016) Grassroots Innovation and Innovation Democracy, STEPS Working Paper 89, Brighton: STEPS Centre.
