Achieving Social Innovative Policy

Just like individuals can address social problems through social ventures, the government itself can become a catalyst of innovative policy to bring change. While it is more common to hear about social innovations, innovative public policy is harder to come by. Many social enterprises try to deal as little as possible with the government when selling a product to meet social needs while one has to always deal with the government to pass innovative public policy.  But just like there are ways to incentivize social entrepreneurship, there are also ways to incentivize innovation within branches dealing with public policy.  

New ways to address problems using policy can result in dramatic changes for the public. The conditional cash transfer program had significant results reducing poverty in Brazil and Mexico. It is sometimes harder for social enterprises to succeed at alleviating a social problem than for a government to address the problem through innovative means. A government often has more resources and capabilities than a social venture. Governments are often slow or incompetent to address certain social problems, but there are ways to bring innovation into a government.

In the article “How Social Innovation is Helping Homeless Veterans,” Ron Ashkenas describes how an innovation approach by public administrators resulted in a dramatic improvement to address chronic homelessness among veterans. Ashkenas’ article led me to believe that we could facilitate innovative public policy by:

• ·      Creating a sense or urgency for the social problem
• ·      Bringing together a diverse group of passionate leaders to address the problem
• ·      Establishing a supportive environment for innovation

Whichever social problem we are addressing, we have to make it a priority among public officials. In the article, US Veteran Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki made sure that institutions and agencies dealing with veterans were aware of the high rate of homelessness among veterans. He raised the issue and brought people and organizations together to address homelessness among veterans.

In the article, Rapid Results Institute organized a boot camp with teams from 4-5 cities to house homeless veterans. Members of teams included case managers and program managers from organizations like the Public Housing Authority, local VA offices and local NGOs. The team only had 100 days to address the problem and then their strategy was implemented and improved. Bringing in people that care about the same problem is beneficial because they not only bring in different ideas, but can also bring in different resources.  

Innovative public policy can have a bottoms-up approach. We often like to think that the national government needs to address all our problems. People often target the national government to bring change and neglect to act locally. But we can start locally by creating a grassroots movement to address a social problem. It is sometimes easier to have a narrower target. We need to get people to be more politically involved and create a supportive environment. We need to get communities excited and passionate about social innovation. And we can start locally and expand. Many social enterprises will at some point have to rely in government to expand and grow; this can be eased if we create a grassroots movement for social innovation. As individuals, we can promote social innovation within government.