Can we innovate for happiness? Should we?

Transparency is one of the most attractive characteristics in an interlocutor. So here's where I come from at the start of my social innovation journey: Put simply, government human service delivery to its most needy citizens (those living with chronic and severe disability, mental illness and brain injury) in developed country settings actually serves to scaffold dependence rather than foster independence. As the largest player in the human service space, governments the world over get to structure the conversations about how this particular part of the world works. The trouble is, scaffolding dependence only begets more dependence.

In case the URL I have attached to this post doesn't work, I'd love it if you could google Geoff Mulgan (from the Young Foundation in the UK) and watch his TEDx talk of the 25th March 2011, and tell me if you think what he says is as important as I believe. He talks alot about happiness and reslience (hence the title of this post). Actually, he (and I) think that governments should scaffold resilience rather than dependence.

Here's the rub: someone who is happy and feels a strong sense of agency over their own affairs tends to make fewer demands of those who support them than if they are unhappy and feel a lack of control. In my experience, this can be true even if someone lives with comorbid disability and mental illness with a tendency to the sort of crises that require stabilisation in hospital intensive care units.

I believe that the conversations that occur in the human service space should be as much about restoring and bolstering social capital as they should be about subsistence support with daily living.

I want to explore how social innovation enablers can permit this more authentic voice in the discource to emerge. I am excited about the possibility of mobile telephony in this space. Can this be a vehicle for social inclusion? I note the power transfer from state to individual that occurs in phenomena such as Nigerian citizens monitoring elections from mobiles, and I wonder: can we tap into the resilience of people with disabilities via their mobiles to effect similar power transfers? And if we can, how do we get governments to listen?