SIE kommt! 20 March 2011
Posted by cooperatoby in cooperative.Tags: social innovation
add a comment
SIE kommt!
I was privileged (the event was sold out) to be at the launch of Social Innovation Europe in Brussels on 17th March. The Commission is opening such a broad umbrella that there are bound to be holes in the weave, and I fell through at least one of them.
In the opening session, I was greatly pleased when both key speakers, the Young Foundation’s Geoff Mulgan and Commission President José Manuel Barroso, credited the co-operative movement as one of Europe’s greatest gifts to the world. So I naturally thought co-operative ideas would permeate the discussion later on. But the main speakers were from regional authorities, conventional firms, foundations and social enterprises.
Then I attended the workshop on workplace innovation and found it still to be living in the corporatist world that I remarked on in relation to the mutual learning seminar on self-employment in November 2010. It would be a tripartite world, only the trade unions are absent. In fact it mostly consists of academics, while the employers and government are pretty silent.
To raise the profile of real workplace innovation, I mentioned the experience of my old co-operative, Suma Wholefoods, in organising itself according to Stafford Beer’s Viable Systems Model (VSM), under the leadership of Jon Walker. This has enabled a 150-strong workforce to collectively manage a business that turns over some €30 million a year, without sacrificing its founding principles such as equal pay or job rotation. Suma serves thousand of customers with thousand of product lines, and its key principle is to give each worker, each department, as much autonomy as it can, the only limit being the survival of the enterprise as a whole.
The social innovation project is a worthy one, and the co-operative movement should be at its core.
References
Jon Walker’s VSM Guide
A slideshow by Jon Walker explaining the VSM
PS: Sie kommt! (she’s coming!) heralds the unforgettable Queen of the Night’s aria in the Magic Flute
The social economy as an engine for social innovation 24 October 2009
Posted by cooperatoby in EU, social economy.Tags: co-operative, EU, social economy, social innovation
add a comment
Reflections on the EESC seminar of 22nd October 2009
The European Economic and Social Committee held a seminar on 22nd October 2009 on the subject Getting to the End of the Tunnel: Creating the Right Environment for the Social Economy.
Social innovation was on the agenda and one of the speakers was Matteo Bonifacio from the Bureau of European Policy Advisers (BEPA), the Commission’s think tank on future policy that has taken over from the Future Studies Unit.
He noted that, today, economic and social challenges are becoming indistinguishable. This poses policy makers with a question: social issues can be addressed either as a separate complement to economic policy, or by viewing the two as inseparable. You can view the social economy as “the enterprises that do the rest” – what business enterprises don’t do – or you can take the view that all enterprises have a social responsibility. In other words, he posed the distinction between targeted policy – things like prizes and incubators for social entrepreneurs – and mainstreaming – making “social” a key word in all policies that make up the post-Lisbon strategy.
A number of Commission DGs are working on social innovation, and BEPA had held a seminar on the subject on 19-20 January 2009. A report will be published probably in February 2010, after consultation throughout the Commission.
Speaking from the floor, I argued two points:
1. Mainstreaming can go too far
The social economy, by definition, combines private and public resources. The main public source of financial support for its development has in practice been the European Social Fund (ESF). Its high point has been EQUAL, which had a €3 bn budget over 6 years. The social economy was the 3rd most popular theme, with 424 development partnerships in 18 member states accounting for about 9% of that sum.
The problem is that now EQUAL is over, there is now no Community Initiative in the ESF, and the momentum and visibility that had been built up has been lost. Where is the follow-up?
What has survived is a seven-country learning network led by Poland, which is part of the Learning for Change programme, and is designed to build the capacity of the public administrations and key stakeholders to manage the ESF better. The Better Future for the Social Economy (BFSE) network addresses the key European issues for the social economy – public procurement, impact measurement, state aid, SSGIs, finance and social franchising. But it has a relatively small budget – about half a million euros.
It’s not true that all has been lost – the Swedish and Spanish examples presented at the conference show that progress is still being made – but work on the ground is now fragmented and incoherent. The social economy and inclusive entrepreneurship is explicitly mentioned in about 30% of the 117 new ESF operational programmes but it’s very difficult to get an overview of what’s happening. The “brain” of the innovation system in the ESF has been disconnected.
So, the policy of transferring the learning of EQUAL into the mainstream ESF seems to have backfired. There is still an important place for targeted policy, especially where innovation is concerned.
2. The social economy as social innovator
Mr Bonifacio wondered whether the distinction between the social economy and CSR was negligible. I think it is very far from that. The BEPA seminar on social innovation did include “citizen” representatives from the Social Platform (for instance from the European Anti-Poverty Network), and it did include individual examples of social economy initiatives (such as San Patrignano). But it did not include the social economy as an organised sector or movement, and this is symptomatic of what seems to be a persistent blind spot in EU policy.
Social innovation is about meeting people’s needs in new ways, and in order to do that it needs to connect with citizens and find out what those changing needs are. This relies on stimulating the participation of citizens. And it is the social economy that is the way of organising citizen participation in the economy. Therefore, the social economy must be involved in systematic efforts to promote social innovation. To overlook this means that you waste the capacity of the social economy to network, to spread new ideas and transfer expertise. It is folly to ignore the strength of the social economy as a mutual support system.
The St Bernards of social innovation 9 May 2009
Posted by cooperatoby in EU.Tags: social innovation
add a comment
We are doing something new and uncharted. The delightful image was proposed that our project is a mountaineering expedition, in the fog and without a road map. I, as part of the technical assistance team, am standing by, ready to mount a rescue mission if any of the intrepid participants should go off-piste. In which case, I naturally ask, please can I have my little barrel of brandy?
Brand loyalty 8 May 2009
Posted by cooperatoby in cooperative, social economy.Tags: co-operative, EU, social innovation
add a comment
Social innovation isn’t a new idea, but it is fashionable, particularly since EU Commission president Barroso has taken up the idea as a rallying cry. It is clear that innovation is far more than developing a new product and bringing it successfully to market, as innovation policy has it. We can’t ignore the far more interesting and difficult realm of the new social relations that are needed to support such new phenomena of consumption.
But what is social innovation? Is it more than another of the periodic rebranding exercises that lay down an every thicker palimpsest of buzzwords: local employment development, community economic development, local development… local employment initiatives, local initiatives for development and employment… corporate social responsibility, social responsibility of enterprises, territorial social responsibility… co-operatives, community co-operatives, community businesses, community enterprises, social enterprises, social entrepreneurship, social businesses, even social business enterprises…
It’s hard to choose among these, so how do we decide which are worth more than the others? It seems we have to go back to first principles. Who benefits and who controls? If social innovation as a process is “the design and implementation of creative ways of meeting social needs” then it is about ways of:
- listening to society as it voices what it needs
- deciding which is the appropriate vehicle to meet those needs, whether through state action, business or community action
- enabling people to act for themselves to meet as many needs as possible
To build new initiatives you need communication networks, that allow messages to circulate efficiently, and joint projects to be built up incrementally. Responsive communication can certainly be helped by new technologies – collaborative tools like wikis and YouTube. But it also relies on structures to put productive activity within the feedback loop, to put citizens in charge of economic activity.
Of all the flavours of participative democracy, it is co-operativism that has consistently, for 114 years or more, provided this bedrock. It delivers economic and social benefits to people whom it values as individuals. That’s why social innovation should have a large component of co-operativism, and the co-operative movement should give its all to promote social innovation.
