Social Innovation Quotes & Sayings

Social innovation thrives on collaboration; on doing things with others, rather than just to them or for them: hence the great interest in new ways of using the web to 'crowdsource' ideas, or the many experiments involving users in designing services. — Geoff Mulgan

Rudolf Steiner, whose synthesis of science, consciousness, and social innovation continues to inspire my work and whose methodological grounding in — C. Otto Scharmer

The number one use case for social media among our customers is around innovation - innovating with employees and with customers. For most businesses this is going to deliver the highest ROI. — Sandy Carter

Because there was no pre-existing patrician elite, those successful in the new book industry could write very swiftly to the top of the social hierarchy. — Andrew Pettegree

I see a Canada that is determined to increase the franchise of its citizens and that is at the forefront of expanding the rights of people across the globe. It is a country able to see beyond a world divided by privilege, wealth, and colour to one determined by equal rights and the sense that a good country is one where people care about what happens to one another. It is a country whose politicians will embrace individuals' successes, the creation of wealth, and a never-ending effort to open up opportunities for its residents. Prosperity, innovation, social justice, and sustainability will be at the centre of every political debate. — Bob Rae

Our Government understands that local, community organizations are essential in addressing social issues like economic development, poverty, education and integration in Canadian communities. The Community and College Social Innovation Fund will connect the innovative talent of researchers and students at colleges and polytechnics to meet the research needs of local community organizations to build stronger, safer, healthier communities. — Ed Holder

I started to think about what drives innovation and what its social significance might be. The next step was to think innovators are taking a leap into the unknown. That led me to the thought that it is also a source of fun and employee engagement. — Edmund Phelps

The Internet has become a remarkable fount of economic and social innovation largely because it's been an archetypal level playing field, on which even sites with little or no money behind them - blogs, say, or Wikipedia - can become influential. — James Surowiecki

We live in an extraordinary time. We are caught up in a pace of social and technological change that makes our work, our business and education, sources of anxiety and unfulfillment. Thinking about our thinking and observing our observations can bring us a new world in which work becomes a place for innovation, and in which peace, wisdom, friendship, companionship and community can exist. Let us design this world together. — Fernando Flores

She would initiate three "races to the top" from the federal level - with prizes of $100 million, $75 million, and $50 million - to vastly accelerate innovations in social technologies: Which state can come up with the best platform for retraining workers? Which state can design a pilot city or community of the future where everything from self-driving vehicles and ubiquitous Wi-Fi to education, clean energy, affordable housing, health care, and green spaces is all integrated into a gigabit-enabled platform? Which city can come up with the best program for turning its public schools into sixteen-hour-a-day community centers, adult learning centers, and public health centers? We need to take advantage of the fact that we have fifty states and hundreds of cities able to experiment and hasten social innovation. In — Thomas L. Friedman

Theirs is the customary human reaction when confronted with innovation: to flounder about attempting to adapt old responses to new situations or to simply condemn or ignore the harbingers of change
a practice refined by the Chinese emperors, who used to execute messengers bringing bad news. The new technological environments generate the most pain among those least prepared to alter their old value structures. The literati find the new electronic environment far more threatening than do those less committed to literacy as a way of life. When an individual or social group feels that its whole identity is jeopardized by social or psychic change, its natural reaction is to lash out in defensive fury. But for all their lamentations, the revolution has already taken place. — Marshall McLuhan

Philanthropy is often seen as society's risk capital. That means the onus is on philanthropists, nonprofit leaders and social entrepreneurs to innovate. But philanthropic innovation is not just about creating something new. It also means applying new thinking to old problems, processes and systems. — Laura Arrillaga-Andreessen

The way to be irreplaceable is to become a social innovator. Start projects that motivate you to save the world and simultaneously make you money (and create mindshare) for your company. Social innovation makes magic happen. — Richie Norton

The only hope for social networking sites from a business point of view is for a magic formula to appear in which some method of violating privacy and dignity becomes acceptable. — Jaron Lanier

He belonged to the old school of country gentlemen, ruling his estate with semi-benevolent tyranny and turning his back on all symptoms of social innovation. Under his domination the Packlestone country had been looked after on feudal system lines. His method of dealing with epistolary complaints from discontented farmers was to ignore them; in verbal intercourse he bulled them and sent them about their business with a good round oath. Such people, he firmly believed, were put there by Providence to touch their hats and do as they were told by their betters ... And as such he continued beyond his eightieth year, until he fell into a fish-pond on his estate and was buried by the parson whose existence he had spurned by his arrogance. — Siegfried Sassoon

Throughout the history of the Internet, most of the innovation has come as a by-product of efforts to facilitate communication within social groups of various kinds (academics, bloggers, peer-to-peer file sharing), rather than as the result of profit-oriented investment. Rather than taking the lead, the business and government sectors have adopted innovations developed in Internet communities, and realised significant productivity gains as a result. — John Quiggin

Any attempt to break with the past, or with existing social structures, is a failure if it leads to a bored, listless, and colourless style of life; assertive and enduring innovation, like the mastering of a new environment, requires the confidence and discipline which are founded on exuberant emotions. — John Carroll

People who are driven by their values will overcome hurdles, difficulties, and obstacles in ways that people driven only by profit will never be able to — Simon S. Tam

The real work of social innovation is to fix our broken human systems. — Cheryl Heller

I want to be remembered as someone who put India on the scientific map of the world in terms of large innovation. I want to be remembered for making a difference to global healthcare. And I want to be remembered as someone who did make a difference to social economic development in India. — Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

What did trust, cooperation, progressive taxation and the interventionist state bequeath to western societies in the decades following 1945? The short answer is, in varying degrees, security, prosperity, social services and greater equality. We have grown accustomed in recent years to the assertion that the price paid for these benefits - in economic inefficiency, insufficient innovation, stifled entrepreneurship, public debt and a loss of private initiative - was too high. Most of these criticisms are demonstrably false. — Tony Judt

Costa Rica remains peacefully and firmly committed to the well- being and safety of our population. We promote a model of development based upon harmony with nature; solidarity and social inclusion; economic and trade opening; development of our human resources, and innovation. — Laura Chinchilla

Prosperity in human society is misunderstood. The difference between a rich and poor society is the number of problems that society solves for its citizens. That means technological innovation is the source of all prosperity, but with every tech innovation, you also get disruption - ultimately, social and civic disruption. — Nick Hanauer

When you are trying to do something very innovative and revolutionary, you must also open yourself to a lot of questions. — Sharad Vivek Sagar

Contrary to what we hear, the great American divide is not a clash between conservatives who advocate liberty versus progressives who oppose liberty. Rather, the two sides each affirm a certain type of liberty. One side, for example, cherishes economic liberty while the other champions liberty in the sexual and social domain. Nor is it a clash between patriots and anti-patriots. Both sides love America, but they love a different type of America. One side loves the America of Columbus and the Fourth of July, of innovation and work and the "animal spirit" of capitalism, of the Boy Scouts and parochial schools, of traditional families and flag-saluting veterans. The other side loves the America of tolerance and social entitlements, of income and wealth redistribution, of affirmative action and abortion, of feminism and gay marriage. — Dinesh D'Souza

They listened to the last enchantments of the Middle Ages, heard the horns of Elfland, and made designs on the culture that our own age is only beginning fully to appreciate. They were philologists and philomyths: lovers of logos (the ordering power of words) and mythos (the regenerative power of story), with a nostalgia for things medieval and archaic and a distrust of technological innovation that never decayed into the merely antiquarian. Out of the texts they studied and the tales they read, they forged new ways to convey old themes - sin and salvation, despair and hope, friendship and loss, fate and free will - in a time of war, environmental degradation, and social change. — Philip Zaleski

The feed was probably the biggest innovation in social media of late. But the interesting thing about a feed is that the more content you consume, the farther in time you go. — Evan Spiegel

If the positive innovations connect exponentially before the massive breakdowns reinforce one another, the system can re-pattern itself to a higher order of consciousness and freedom without the predicted economic, environmental, and social collapse ... If the system could go either way, a slight intervention to assist the convergence of the positive can tip the scales of evolution in favor of the enhancement of life on Earth. — Barbara Marx Hubbard

And it is change that always provides the opportunity for the new and different. Systematic innovation therefore consists in the purposeful and organized search for changes, and in the systematic analysis of the opportunities such changes might offer for economic or social innovation. — Peter F. Drucker

Innovation-the heart of the knowledge economy-is fundamentally social. — Malcolm Gladwell

The pace of digital innovation is astonishing. It's impossible to imagine life without the web, smartphones, social networks. And yet the consumer products and everyday objects all around us are still essentially dumb. — Andy Hobsbawm

Through our government's updated science, technology and innovation strategy, we are making the record investments necessary to push the boundaries of knowledge, create jobs and opportunities, and improve the quality of life of Canadians. Our government's Canada Research Chairs Program develops, attracts and retains top talent researchers in Canada whose research, in turn, creates long-term social and economic benefits while training the next generation of students and researchers in Canada. — Ed Holder

People who have made comparative studies of many different societies, know that when status is ascribed, rather than achieved, individual efforts towards excellence are not directed through any form of innovation; rather, the enhancement of status occurs only through the realisation of a previously well defined role position. It is only with social change, or when some form of continual dynamic disequilibium occurs in a society, that we begin to observe the development of achievement motivation in its modern form. — Dor Bahadur Bista

Albrecht's Law: Social innovations tend to the level of minimum tolerable well being. — Paul Dickson

How could the prisoner break his chains? I pictured a world, a righteous world, with no sin, no bonds, no social obligations; a world throbbing with creativity, innovation, and thought, nothing else; a world of dedicated solitude, without father, mother, wife, or child; a world where a man could travel lightly, immersed in art alone. — Naguib Mahfouz

It was the combination of EC2 and S3 - storage and compute, two primitives linked together - that transformed both AWS and the technology world. Startups no longer needed to spend their venture capital on buying servers and hiring specialized engineers to run them. Infrastructure costs were variable instead of fixed, and they could grow in direct proportion to revenues. It freed companies to experiment, to change their business models with a minimum of pain, and to keep up with the rapidly growing audiences of erupting social networks like Facebook and Twitter. — Brad Stone

I cannot help fearing that men may reach a point where they look on every new theory as a danger, every innovation as a toilsome trouble, every social advance as a first step toward revolution, and that they may absolutely refuse to move at all. — Alexis De Tocqueville

[L]ike people, ideas have social lives. They're one way when they're by themselves, and another when they're surrounded by their peers. Crammed together, they grow more uncertain, more interesting, more surprising; they come out of themselves and grow more appealing, and funnier. You wouldn't want all of intellectual life to be that social--we couldn't make progress that way. But there's a special atmosphere that develops whenever truly different ideas congregate, and, on the whole, it's too rare. — Joshua Rothman

As our world becomes increasingly interconnected, we need to find better solutions that will include everyone in today's opportunities. (197) — Jacqueline Novogratz

Since 2000, no important technology innovation in the United States has been scaled up to create millions of manufacturing, marketing, and engineering jobs here, as personal computers and related industries did. While selling online and social networking are clearly transformational movements that have created entrepreneurial opportunities, fewer than fifty thousand traditional jobs - those with full-time hours, benefits, and health insurance - have been created. — Doug Menuez

Wanting to change only the British position at the top of the American social structure, John Adams feared that a "rage for innovation" would consume what was worthwhile about American culture. — John Ferling

Any system, biological, economic, or social, that gets so encrusted that it cannot self-evolve, a system that systematically scorns experimentation and wipes out the raw material of innovation, is doomed over the long term on this highly variable planet. — Donella Meadows

[ ... ] a familiar art historical narrative [ ... ] celebrates the triumph of the expressive individual over the collective, of innovation over tradition, and autonomy over interdependence. [ ... ] In fact, a common trope within the modernist tradition of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries involved the attempt to reconstruct or recover the lost ideal of an art that is integrated with, rather than alienated from, the social. By and large, however, the dominant model of avant-garde art during the modern period assumes that shared or collective values and systems of meaning are necessarily repressive and incapable of generating new insight or grounding creative praxis. — Grant H. Kester

All over the world, social innovation is tackling some of the most pressing problems facing society today - from fair trade, distance learning, hospices, urban farming and waste reduction to restorative justice and zero-carbon housing. But most of these are growing despite, not because of, help from governments. — Geoff Mulgan

For policymakers, then, the question should not be whether to pick particular directions when it comes to innovation, since some governments are already doing that, and with good results. Rather, the question should be how to do so in a way that is democratically accountable and that solves the most pressing social and technological challenges. — Anonymous

I believe in solving social ills with business skills. — Richie Norton

The popular contemporary wisdom that a liberal arts education is outmoded is true only to the extent that social equality, liberty, and worldly development of mind and character are outmoded and have been displaced by another set of metrics: income streams, profitability, technological innovation. — Wendy Brown

When your focus is social change and not financial change, why wouldn't you want to share that openly? Innovation only succeeds when it's shared. — Cameron Sinclair

When it comes to branding and the ever-changing social media phenomenon, you're not a mushroom. In other words, you shouldn't be kept in the dark and fed a pile of...well, you get the idea. — David Brier

The Princess of Parma was a Courvoisier in that she was incapable of innovation in social matters, but unlike the Courvoisiers in that the surprises the Duchesse de Guermantes perpetually held in store for her engendered in her not, as in them, antipathy but a sense of wonder. — Marcel Proust

Philanthropists should find innovations that release the energies of people. Individuals don't want to be taken care of --they need to be given a chance to fulfill their own potential. (142) — Jacqueline Novogratz

If you open up the mind, the opportunity to address both profits and social conditions are limitless. It's a process of innovation. — Jerry Greenfield

In a sense, scattered dots are exactly what one would expect to see in a pre-Enlightenment, pre-mechanized world. There were disbelievers in Greek antiquity just as there were everywhere, but there was no obvious role for mass-movement atheism in a culture where ensuring the stability of the state - which depended on the favor of the gods - was prized above all else. Atheism has prospered in the West since the eighteenth century because society has a role for it: in an advanced capitalist economy based on technological innovation, it has been necessary to claw intellectual and moral authority away from the clergy and reallocate it to the secular specialists in science and engineering. It is this social function that has allowed atheism to emerge as a movement composed of individual atheists. — Tim Whitmarsh

Transparency may be the most disruptive and far-reaching innovation to come out of social media. — Paul Gillin

In the eighties and nineties, the innovation agenda was exclusively focused on enterprises. There was a time in which economic and social issues were seen as separate. Economy was producing wealth, society was spending. In the 21st century economy, this is not true anymore. Sectors like health, social services and education have a tendency to grow, in GDP percentage as well as in creating employment, whereas other industries are decreasing. In the long term, an innovation in social services or education will be as important as an innovation in the pharmaceutical or aerospatial industry. — Diogo Vasconcelos

The conservative does not defend the Old Regime; he speaks on behalf of old regimes - in the family, the factory, the field. There, ordinary men, and sometimes women, get to play the part of little lords and ladies, supervising their underlings as if they all belong to a feudal estate . . . The task of this type of conservatism---democratic feudalism - -becomes clear: surround these old regimes with fences and gates, protect them from meddlesome intruders like the state or a social movement, while descanting on mobility and innovation, freedom and the future. — Corey Robin