What existing socially innovative developments do you notice in the Nordic countries?
The Nordic countries are known worldwide for their “social welfare states”, featuring what has been referred to as “universal” and “inclusive” educational and social policies. The basis for their high standard of living established was laid in the 19th century however with a combination of public investment and entrepreneurial drive. While able to benefit from relatively sustainable exploitation of natural resources all along, they have been able to build highly innovative and diversified economies. In the latter part of the 20th century, the continued growth of the public sector and distortive tax systems along with various incentive problems became too all-encompassing and led a decline in international competitiveness, especially for Sweden, which is the largest of the Nordic countries.
The entrepreneurial spirit has remained strong however and over the last decades there has been a revitalized wave, and also increased diversity, of entrepreneurial and innovative energies across the Nordic countries. This is highly visible in information and communications technology applications such as Skype, Spotify, Klarna, and so forth.
The Nordic countries are however great contributors also when it comes to social innovations, which have often been evolved in response to outstanding problems and issues in sectors that are at the mainstay of the welfare state, such as education, health care and social services. Especially Sweden and Denmark are full of unusual bottom-up initiatives by individual (or networks of) professionals, teachers, students, parents, or people acting in various other capacities, residing in disparate regions, who have come up with pioneering new approaches to resolve everyday problems, and to inspire social bonding and collaboration in new sorts of ways.
For examples, one may look at “grej-of-the-day“, an initiative by two teachers at Västanå school in Northern Sweden which came up with an “elevator pitch” for having students pay attention to news and developments around the world and turn them into sources of creativity and vehicles for students to capture the context of world-events. Another is “meetup”, the initiative by the young Dane Morten V to inspire meetings between people who share the same interest and, using the internet and social media, creating a vehicle for overcoming social, cultural and language barriers that has now reached out to 8 million members in 100 countries, with 50,000 Meetups scheduled each week.
The other Nordic countries, while having less dominating public services, somewhat oddly display less evident examples of individual initiatives giving rise to social change of that sort. Nevertheless they too provide many examples of related processes. For instance, the Finnish North Karelia project, which first started in 1972, led to behavioural change in the form of more healthy habits, on a magnitude that is believed to have added 7 years to the average life span of Finnish men and 6 years for women. To a greater extent, outside Sweden and Denmark, initiatives seem to have been orchestrated primarily within the realm of the public sectors. In either case, however, individual initiatives has no doubt been important, and somehow the Nordic countries continue to be good at fostering a rich pool of new ideas capable of challenging and overcoming incumbent ways of doing things.
This may seem paradoxical, as the Nordic countries still appear relatively homogeneous in many respects. Here, however, the social innovation agendas include a number of schemes devised to help overcome cultural fragmentation, at home or around the world. Examples include The City Bee Project, bybi, or Cycling Lessons for Better Social Integration, both Danish, or the Swedish “with-your-baby“. In an era of ongoing globalisation and growing migration flows, meeting with the challenges of maintaining openness and welcoming cultural diversity, such initiatives are of great importance to the Nordic countries themselves as well as to the wider world.
Is social innovation formally positioned at the policy level of the Nordic countries?
To some extent, yes, but in practice the strong standing of social innovation in the Nordic countries is not due to explicit policy support but personal initiative to address shortcomings or complement the delivery of public policies. Having said that, the availability of public funding to support sound projects while neutral with respect to the sectoral belonging of those responsible, has contributed importantly to the diffusion and scaling of many initiatives,
What is the biggest challenge for social innovations to advance?
With information and communications technology offering increasingly fast diffusion of new ideas and initiatives, new ideas spread much faster than was the case in the past. Now the primary obstacles to success in social innovation have to do with entrenched ways of doing things, with mindset in regard to turf and competition with existing administration and established practices whether effective or not.
Which impacts do you expect from social innovations for our societies?
Social innovations have clearly played an important role as a sort of mechanism to respond to outstanding problems that have fallen behind the chairs. Social innovations play a more important role than that however, by inspiring and realizing a change in mindset and readiness to experiment with new solutions rather than rely on established practices alone. In order for social innovations to fulfill their potential in that regard however it is important that policy-making puts more focus on smart data collection and processing for the purpose of enabling local communities to become aware of their relevant performances and help empower and inspire them to work out new appropriate solutions to outstanding issues
Why is social innovation important for your organisation?
The International Organisation for Knowledge Economy and Enterprise Development aims for contributing to and being relevant for action-oriented reform agendas which address outstanding issues and turn them into a source of opportunities. Across the realms of education, health and environmental services, favorable social innovation and related change processes are critical for breaking new ground in regard to entrenched problems. In the SI-Drive project, IKED has compared the presence, mechanisms and outcomes of social innovation in two particular regions, namely the Nordic countries on the one hand and the GCC countries in the Arab Gulf on the other hand. Both these country groupings display important examples of social innovation. At the same time, stark differences exist both between and within these groupings, partly reflecting attitudes to government and the readiness of people, institutions and companies to experiment in developing or trying out new ways of handling critical issues.
Author: Thomas Andersson, Prof., Dr., IKED