Kuba Wygnanski on the state of Social Innovation in Poland

Social innovations in Poland Ready or not ?

Kuba.wygnanski@gmail.com

Innovation in Europe + USA + Japan

Źródło: Pro Inno Europe. 2011. Innovation Union Scoreboard 2010. The Innovation Union's performance scoreboard for Research and Innovation. Brussels: European Commission.

Social Innovations

• What is social innovation?– By the peolpe– For the people – With the people

• Searching for something in the midlle of „catch all” and „elitis approach”.

• Gdynia meeting and its possible formative role

Obstacles for social innovations in Poland

• Low level of social capital (particularly - “linking” dimension) • High level of individualism - smart educated people not translated to

smart institutions• State “bulimia” + regulatory approach to public policy, adversarial

concept of state and civil society • Lack of evidence base policy • Market proselytism – deep believe that competition is the main source of

innovation and optimal configuration of needs and solutions • Innovation subordinated to institutional domains of academia and

enterprises - not so much to governance and social processes • Weak meta competences – for example “how to learn on own mistakes”,

“how to learn from others”

• Lack of proper "distillations" of good practices – problem of self-selection of innovation - lack of proper validation / fake evaluations

• Lack of scaling and convergence mechanism for good practices

• Lack of institutional space for social innovation – incubators, hubs, centers for excellence etc.

• Patenting, patenting, patenting – lack of culture of „open code”

• Outgrown technical infrastructures of information and training (ESF type)

• Not enough „structural holes” – bridging sectors, industries and groups

Funding for social innovations Problems with public funding – Lack of acceptance for risk– Too big chunks – Irrelevant assessment process– Lack of validation – Poor mainstreaming of products– ESF solution or problem

Para banking institutions

Weak private funding (traditional model philanthropy and mostly shallow and instrumental practices of CSR)

•

Institutional backbone

• Technology clusters• Private sector • Academia• NGOs• Public administration • EU „generated” public infrastrucure

Hopes• Strategy of development of social and creative

capital• New Ministry of Administration and

Digitalization (last week)• Necessity of respond to the crisis -> sclerosis

or innovation

Unit for Research and Social Innovatioan SHIPYARD

• „Social Bauhaus”• Educational institution• PhD -> PhDo• Examples

– Civic Foresight – Civic City Warsaw (historical map of civic activism since XIX

century in Warsaw)– Public Participation Laboratory– ICT in Local Communities – High Resoilutioin Da ta Repository for Local Communities

(mojapolis.pl) – ICT – in Local Communities (eg. Naprawmyto.pl)– Advanced on-going evaluations ( eg. Invisble Children)– Reserch and impelementation of city wide voluntter corps