What is a Social Innovation Lab? [Part 2]
image courtesy of DESIS: http://www.newschool.edu/desis/
We’ve talked a bit recently about how Lifehack emerged in 2014 to go beyond running a few events, and start asking the hard questions about the role of social innovation in improving youth wellbeing, and specifically about what the support structure might be to link up, foster collaboration, and nurture projects which emerge. In 2014 we found a global community talking about social innovation labs, and that we were actually running one.
That said, we realise the language can be a little jargon-y, so we asked our friends on twitter to help us out:
What’s your absolute simplest way of explaining a social innovation lab? cc @_alkennedy@pennyhagen@dansolo@tomfarrand
— Sam Rye (@samrye_enspiral) April 24, 2015
We got some awesome responses from a wide range of practitioners, champions, advocates and more. Here’s a few:
@samrye_enspiral a collaborative + experimental space where diverse people prototype solutions with the potential to make a beautiful world — tom farrand (@tomfarrand) April 27, 2015
@EdNZ @samrye_enspiral having intent, creating space, gathering people, experimenting to create systemic change
— Elizabeth001 (@Elizabeth001) April 24, 2015
@samrye_enspiral a diverse group of people taking a trial & error approach addressing a socio-political challenge at it’s root cause — Zaid Hassan (@zaidhassan) April 25, 2015
‘Experimenting with innovation as if people and planet mattered’ @samrye_enspiral @_alkennedy @pennyhagen @tomfarrand
— dan burgess (@dansolo) April 24, 2015
@samrye_enspiral @indy_johar @ImmyKaur @hamishl An enquiry based approach where diverse teams work together to solve complex social problems — Billy Matheson (@billymatheson) April 24, 2015
@samrye_enspiral a safe place to try ideas that might solve problems people have
— Adithi Pandit (@adithipandit) April 24, 2015
Fascinatingly, the conversation roamed over night and into the next day…
The twitter conversation about social labs has triggered offline meet ups with a range of people in NZ who are interested in the practice and how it could be applied to other projects which may link to but not be Lifehack’s core Wellbeing focus – we see some real possibilities for this approach to tackle a range of social, environmental and economic challenges, and there’s a team of people at Enspiral (our mothership) who are up for the conversation too.
We’re still trying to narrow in on easily accessible jargon-free language for social innovation labs, but here’s our latest thoughts:
Social Innovation Labs are a practice made up of a physical or virtual space where groups of people can gather to explore social challenges, learn new approaches, and experiment with tools and solutions.
So with all these tweets and links, how would YOU describe a social innovation lab?
