Social Innovation, evaluation and outcomes April 6, 2009
Posted by Paul Duignan in : Impact evaluation, Outcomes theory & politics, Research influening policy, Outcomes theory, Using the approach, Easy Outcomes, Outcomes models, DoView , trackbackI attended a launch of the New Zealand national Center for Social Innovation last night. Geoff Mulgan from the Young Foundation (a similar center in the U.K.) talked about social innovation. The social innovation movement is about getting stakeholders and sectors together to do things differently to achieve better social outcomes. Already a dynamic movement, it has recently received a shot in the arm from the global economic melt-down - traditional ways of doing things are increasingly being questioned and people are looking for new solutions. A number of points made by Geoff and in the subsequent discussion are particularly relevant to outcomes and evaluation were:
The importance of evaluation - Geoff pointed to the importance of evaluation in convincing stakeholders that particular social innovations are a good idea.
Cross-sector collaboration - the need to develop collaborations across sectors when doing social innovation.
A ‘just do it’ attitude - an attitude of getting in and experiementing with doing things and then implementing those which seem good ideas and moving on from those which do not.
It got me thinking that some of the tools and approaches we are developing in outcomes theory, Easy Outcomes and DoView may be able to be used in some ways to assist in social innovation work. In particular, the whole point of outcomes thinking is to get people to think in terms of what outcomes they want and then to work back to designing and experimenting with innovative programs that might be able to achieve them. The outcomes visualization work we are doing with DoView lends itself to facilitating cross-sector groups in discussion of the outcomes they are trying to achieve and how they are all going to work together to get there.
Check out the social innovation web sites if you have not already, it is exciting stuff.
Paul Duignan, PhD
Evaluation and Outcomes Blog (OutcomesBlog.org)
evaluation
networking - groups
innovation
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