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What is social innovation and what does it have to do with ageing?


Michael Young – Lord Young as he eventually became – has become celebrated as a ‘social entrepreneur’.  He may not have coined the phrase, but his example certainly helped to make it part of the common currency of debate about organizations that operate outside or alongside the ‘market’.  He was fertile in ideas for new organizations rather than new products or new businesses, and he wanted to see these ideas realised in the social world around him.  The fact that he set up a string of organizations and charities that still exist as part of the ‘third sector’ - including Grandparents’ Plus, International Alert, the Consumers’ Association and U3A (which he co-founded with Eric Midwinter and Peter Laslett) - makes him a kind of paradigm case for social entrepreneurship. 

The idea of social entrepreneurship has taken on an increasingly prominent role in thinking about effective practical responses to a variety of major social challenges, and in particular, those challenges that are associated with inequalities in access to social resources of one kind or another.  We can see this in the establishment of the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the Said Business School here at Oxford.  Its location within a business school underlines the conceptual or theoretical affinity with entrepreneurship as a business activity.  The idea is that certain features of ‘business thinking’ can be detached from the profit motive and applied to some of the social challenges that governments and provider agencies with large bureaucracies struggle with.  Agencies with large bureaucracies have their own ways of doing things, and these are usually based on a provider-client relationship.  The social entrepreneur can and does operate in a different way, and on a smaller scale. The institutional constraints on implementing a new approach to old problem are drastically reduced to make more room for flexibility and innovation.

It’s a short step from social entrepreneurship to social innovation. In 2014, the Skoll Centre collaborated with the Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Cape Town to select and evaluate a set of innovative health delivery projects from the global south.  They issued a call for projects aimed at improving the lives of those affected by tuberculosis, malaria and ‘neglected tropical diseases’, and 25 were finally selected for review.  They are grass roots initiatives, usually small-scale responses to local problems that depend heavily on the involvement of local (non-professional) people. Very often the problem that has to be solved is low uptake of services or limited engagement with services.  Whether the organizational solutions to these problems are innovative in a strict sense - completely new models for dealing with old problems - is less important than their novelty in a particular setting.

And then it’s another short step from social innovation for health to social innovation for healthy ageing.  In Europe, there is now a consortium on Social Innovation for Healthy and Active Ageing, and behind this there is an EU-funded project called INNOVAGE.  The Innovage project, which finished last year, was ‘dedicated to developing and testing, as well as surveying and cataloguing, social innovations that will have a solid impact on improving the quality of life and well-being of older people’.

At the more or less the same time as the EU was setting up Innovage, WHO established a Global Forum on Innovation for Ageing Populations, and last year the WHO Centre for Health Development in Kobe, Japan, held an expert consultation on ‘community-based innovations that support older people in low- and middle-income countries’.  A report on the consultation was published at the beginning of this year and makes interesting reading for me because of its connection with the study of Older People’s Associations that I carried out with HelpAge International last year.  The WHO report is based on 7 case studies and one of these looked at Intergenerational Self-Help Clubs in Vietnam, and these were also included in the HelpAge study.  The organizational ‘problem’ for the WHO case studies is how to engage and mobilise older people to ‘become a resource for their own health’. The solutions are examples - paradigm cases - of social innovation. 

Social innovation in this sense does not refer simply to new ways of doing things or delivering services, but rather to a variety of organizational models that involve innovation in social relations and empowerment as a means of meeting previously unmet needs[i].  Understood in this way, social innovation projects work by creating new social networks and relationships that act as a resource for mutual support.  Increased participation of individuals and communities in activities intended to meet their needs or deliver benefits is an essential element in social innovation initiatives.

 What makes social innovation initiatives particularly appropriate for the promotion of healthy ageing is the connection between healthy ageing and ‘agency’.  The work of primary prevention cannot be carried out effectively without activating individuals to participate in the business of maintaining their own health. The same is true both for efforts to maintain functional ability in individuals with chronic conditions, and for the long-term management of chronic disease (self-monitoring and self-care). The active participation of individuals in maintaining their own health is not a cheap substitute for formal services. It is part and parcel of the reconfiguration of services that is required by a change in the underlying causes of poor health and functional impairment in the population.


[i] General introduction to The International Handbook on Social Innovation. Eds Frank Moulaert et al, Edward Elgar, 2013.

About the Author:

Kenneth Howse is a Senior Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing. He is also a key member of The Collen Programme on Fertility, Education and the Environment.

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Comments Welcome: We welcome your comments on this or any of the Institute's blog posts. Please feel free to email comments to be posted on your behalf to administrator@ageing.ox.ac.uk or use the Disqus facility linked below.