Changework or social innovation?

In 2023, I graduated from a Masters of Studies in Social Innovation at the University of Cambridge. But what is social innovation? Why is this term used in academia, and less so in practice? In this blog, I’ll provide an introduction to the concept of social innovation and its different types, and explain why I ended up coining the term changework in this context.

What is social innovation?

Let’s start with a simple definition. “Social innovation refers to the development of creative and practical solutions to complex social and environmental problems” - Prof. Neil Stott & Prof. Paul Tracey, co-directors of the Cambridge Center for Social Innovation

Put simply, social innovation is about addressing the challenges humanity is facing, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, poverty, and gender equity - just four of the many challenges contained in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Social innovators are the people deploying different types of strategies to address these challenges.

In practice, we call these people by their specific titles or roles, such as activist, policy advisor, community organiser, fundraiser… When a general term is used, it is often ‘changemaker’ (whose growth in popularity is often attributed to Ashoka).

Why are academics using this term?

The research around social innovation grew out of organisational research, such as literature on management and leadership, that is looking at innovation. 

Researchers have suggested that we are currently experiencing a "wave" of social innovation. This wave refers to the growing interest and investment in social innovation around the world, as more and more people recognise the importance of finding new solutions to social and environmental challenges. It is thought to define the upcoming decades, much like the invention of the internet and new media, or of electricity, did in prior generations. Some postulate focusing humanity’s energy and creativity on addressing social and environmental challenges is a necessity. Unfortunately, since this study was published it is looking like the bulk of our collective energy and resources are still going towards tech-based privately owned business models, with AI being the latest major wave. But if you’re ready this, you’re probably with those researchers, and me, in hoping (pleading?) to dedicate more of our time to addressing the massive challenges our own ‘progress’ has created.

What types of social innovators exist?

In academic research, there often isn’t a single definition that everyone agrees upon, and this is no exception. My professors in Cambridge, Prof. Dr. Tracey and Prof. Dr. Stott, proposed in 2017 a typology of social innovation based on how social innovators are organising themselves to address the challenge they are focused on. 

The first, and best known type, is social entrepreneurship: the act of founding an organisation to tackle a social or environmental problem. Some choose to run it as a NPO, some as a traditional for-profit with a social purpose, while new legal forms are already emerging in some countries to account for the prioritisation of impact over, or alongside, financial results. Through the work of organisations such as Ashoka and Skoll in the last decades, social entrepreneurship has become a common concept in both practice and research. 

The second type, social intrapreneurship, refers to the process of addressing these challenges from within established organisations. Social innovators choosing this approach seek to create change by leveraging the networks, skills and resources of established organisations. Championed by organisations such as the League of Intrapreneurs, the idea has been gaining momentum. 

The last type is called social extrapreneurship. Contrary to the first two, this approach is focused on inter-organisational work, such as collaborations, networks and platforms. Social extrapreneurs support the emergence of collaborations amongst new and established organisations, and support innovation through combining the knowledge and resources of stakeholders from different backgrounds. Even though it’s the least-known type, there have been growing calls for more (cross-sector) collaborations to address the SDGs from practice and research alike. This is the approach that my previous work, for instance with collaboratio helvetica where we worked on strategies such as Social Innovation Labs, focused on. 

With Parayma, I am supporting all types of social innovators, though I am most committed to strategies that have the potential to shift paradigms. More about this in the Iceberg blogpost.

Why not just use this word then?

Language matters. Social innovation and social innovators may be a good term in academia, and perhaps also when speaking to stakeholders in the private or public sector, but it doesn’t strike be as the best fit to address most people. It’s quite academic (duh) and may create in some people a distance, where they think to themselves ‘oh no this isn’t me’ even though the definition would 100% apply to them.

I also think the use of ‘innovation’ in this context is a bit misleading. It may suggest to people who don’t dig deeper into it that all we need are new innovative solutions, which their brain may equate to tech, and cute (scientifically disproven) myths like green growth. Which is a narrative I obviously do not subscribe to, as it does not hold the potential to lead us to a just and regenerative future.

And even further, often it’s not even that we need an innovative approach. We need to stop doing something that started 5, 10, 50 years ago. We need to unlearn harmful consumption and production patterns that have become normalised but never should have been. We need to remember how things could be differently, re-train ourselves, re-claim and trust indigenous or ancestral knowledge that was lost, and so on. Not always, in certain cases we indeed need new solutions and approaches, but in some it’s really rather about letting go of some of the things we were sold as ‘innovations’ and ‘progress’ when really it was another brick on the path to self-destruction. 

So that’s why, whilst I appreciate the term, it didn’t feel like the right one to use for Parayma’s work.

What about changemaker?

I think changemaker was in itself a great innovation. It’s a word that encompasses the many kinds of roles we can play in this field and is easily understood. My challenge with it was this: do we really ‘make’ change? Do we ‘make’ things happen? It seems to suggest a level of control, ownership and personal attribution that I have rarely seen in my 16 years of practice. 

Yes, I can ‘make’ a conference happen perhaps. Or a lab. Or a campaign. But what then is the change? And if something does change, can one single person or organisation claim to have been the one to have ‘made’ it happen? 

The trouble is, the deeper our level of work in terms of the kind of change we are working towards, the less easy it becomes to plan, control, and take ownership for. The changes we are working towards are so profound that they will require entire generations of people doing their best for this to come to pass. 

A regenerative future is not ‘made’ in a single action or moment. It is such a long-term endeavour that if we expect to see profound change in the short-term as a direct result of our actions, we are very likely to be disappointed. Worse, many of us (myself included) work ourselves into a burnout because we just want to MAKE the change happen. But we can’t. Not paradigm shifting level change. Not alone, not today, perhaps not in our lifetime. And so people leave the field, because I didn’t make change happen did I? I am not a changemaker. I failed. I will try to live a more small and conformist life. Noooooo! I really don’t want to contribute to anyone feeling this way. 

So after many conversations with fellow practioners/socialinnovators/changemakers, to whom I spoke so much about the importance of bridging the inner and outer work, I landed on the term changeworker. Because that’s what we do. That’s who we are. We are people who work on change. Who work for change. Some who have dedicated our lives or professional careers to change, some who do their best to work on their own choices to align with their values. We put in the work. Inner and outer. Collectively, individually. In the hopes of seeing change, profound change, that benefits everyone (and by that I mean all beings). 

So there you have it! Changeworker. No matter if people don’t understand it right away, it feels right to me. Now that this is cleared up, tell me: what kind of changeworker are you? 

Sources & further reading:

• Paul Tracey & Neil Stott (2017) Social innovation: a window on alternative ways of organizing and innovating, Innovation, 19:1, 51-60, DOI: 10.1080/14479338.2016.1268924 
• Cambridge Center for Social Innovation

• Nicholls, A. and Murdock, A. (2012) ‘The nature of social innovation’, in A. Nicholls and A. Murdock (eds) Social Innovation Blurring Boundaries to Reconfigure Markets. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–30.
• This blogpost was originally published on the blog of collaboratio helvetica.