Public Policy to Encourage Social Innovation

In this blog, I'm going to write based on what I have learned from the class about how public policy can be created to foster social innovations. There are several factors that I think they are important for social innovations. First, the government need to clearly define the term "social innovation" for funding and tax purposes. According to our class definition, social ventures need to be relieved of tax burdens so that they can focus more on delivering social solutions. Therefore, the first goal of public policy should be directed at this tax issue in a way that does not create loopholes for exploitations.

Second, social innovations rely upon creative ideas and a trial-error basis. This is financially adventurous and risky in the business sense. Not many private investors would be comfortable with this level of risk tolerance that is embodied in the nature of social ventures. Therefore, the government can play a role in creating public agencies or foundations that focus on funding these kinds of adventurous innovations. Of course, clear criteria and standards have to be setup to avoid unnecessary waste of public funds. However, these funding filters cannot be too stringent and have to be relaxed enough to accomodate the trail-and-error nature of social innvoations.

Third, social innovators can benefit from the "public goods" of open-source type technology/idea sharing. Public policy can help in creating a framework for this kind of open-source innovations. Past failures can be learnt from. Parts that didn't work can be thrown out, and parts that could work can be recycled. Different teams can work together across time and space on resolving a specific issues. Best practices can be shared. This open-source problem might look simple, but it can be quite complicated, especially when it comes to patenting issue. Public policy should be engineered to address that early on.

Last but not least, the government can help in financing more research into the field of social innvoations. This is not funding ventures, but funding social researchers on the subject matter as a whole science. Questions can be what public policy/government interventions can foster social innovations from the grassroots level; what skills are needed as a pre-requisite for innovations; what types of incentive structures can promote the field and so on.

The field of social innovations deserve more attention from our governments (I'm speaking from the Cambodia context). Social innovators need more advocacy groups to lobby this to the decision-makers at the national level. To be successful, every stakeholder must be engaged, and the efforts must be coordinated.