8 THE OPEN BOOK OF SOCIAL INNOVATION
law-making powers can achieve large-scale change more easily than small community groups. Yet most social change is neither purely top-down nor bottom-up. It involves alliances between the top and the bottom, or between what we call the ‘bees’ (the creative individuals with ideas and energy) and the ‘trees’ (the big institutions with the power and money to make things happen to scale). In what follows we describe many hundreds of methods being used for innovation around the world. They range from ways of thinking to very practical tools for finance or design. Some of them are specific to sectors – government, business or charity. Some are specific to national cultures. But there are many common patterns, and one of the purposes of this project has been to encourage cross-pollination. Much innovation comes from the creative blending of ideas from multiple sources. For example, bringing together diagnostic computer programmes, call centres and nurses to provide new kinds of healthcare; bringing together the very old idea of ‘circles of support’ brought within the criminal justice system; or bringing the idea of enforceable rights into the world of the family and childhood. The tools of innovation will also develop through creative blending and recombination of disparate elements and ideas. We’re already seeing, for example, innovators combining the funding methods used for science and venture capital with those from tendering and grant giving. Others are combining ethnography, visualisation techniques from product design, userinvolvement ideas from social movements, and commissioning methods from the public sector. Business has already adopted some of the models for mobilising networks of users that were developed by the third sector in the 1960s and 1970s. Conversely, some NGOs are learning from venture capital not only how to finance emerging ideas, but also how to kill off ones that aren’t advancing fast enough to free up resources. Our hope is that by gathering many methods together we will accelerate these processes of creative recombination and experimentation. The structure of the book To structure the many methods we’ve collected we look at them through three different lenses: In Part 1 of this book, we look at the processes of innovation. We describe the stages of innovation as spreading outwards from prompts and ideas to