Platforms for Learning
Mini Toolkit
A social innovation approach establishes novel ways to use current resources, creates new networks, relationships, and systems that untangle the web of wicked problems, bringing coherence to a complex world. Catalyzing social innovation requires initiating systemic approaches. One approach is to instate a complexity aware approach to monitoring, evaluation and learning throughout a program life cycle.
This mini toolkit shares the adaptive learning framework of the Work 4 Progress (W4P) program along with insights on adopting principles of ethnography for capturing ambiguous narratives.
Social Innovation tackles ‘wicked’ problems of development. The Harvard Business Review (HBR) defines wicked problems as social or cultural problems that are difficult to solve due to incomplete and contradictory knowledge systems and their interconnected nature with other problems of development. A social innovation approach establishes novel ways to use current resources, creates new networks, relationships and systems that untangle the web of wicked problems, bringing coherence to a complex world.
Catalyzing social innovation requires initiating systemic approaches. One approach is to instate a complexity aware approach to monitoring, evaluation and learning throughout a program life cycle.4 Traditional approaches to evaluation involve assessing specific effects of a program according to a set of pre-determined outcomes. For social innovation based programs, evaluation needs to accommodate the evolving and unpredictable nature of complex systems. There is a need, therefore, to design evaluations and learning systems that are mindful of contextual factors being flexible, iterative and responsive to changing dynamics within interventions.
Read more in the toolkit
Authors: Vrinda Chopra, Stuti Sareen
