The Hidden Side of Social Innovation Policy from Government

Few weeks ago, I had a very interesting quest lecture by famous CMU alumni Arnold Wasserman who is called as the Master of Design. He gave the lecture and case study about how to improve one country's social system from old brick and mortar economy to innovative economy. Actually, he introduced the case of Singapore, one of wealthy nations around the Asia and he has involved this program.

The outlook of this program seems like very well organized and planned. Unlike other countries' government, The Singapore government have spent enough time as over decade to make, execute and fix the plan for encouraging creative industries and entrepreneurship carefully. Also, it's not plan for industry policy only and it has done with entire society like an education and cultural system. As a result, it looks like a great example for the a government driven social innovation.

However, the response of Singaporeans around CMU campus is quite different. Most of Singaporean students don't want to establish their own company in their country instead of finding a good job as a manager of global companies in US and Singapore. And, even some of strong advocates of entrepreneurship don't want to make a startup in Singapore. Truly, They want to start in US or China. The reason is quite simple. The size of economy and population are too small to start new business and their economy system is already depended on the finance industry and manufacturing as the role of the advance base of global companies.

How can we explain this gap? although there is a big increased rate of entrepreneurship in Singapore, I never meet Singaporean who want to build their company in their country. On the other hands, I know many Korean companies that made office in Singapore for a tax benefit and moved back to Korea after the end of benefit period, but the Singapore government counted these cases into their success cases.

I believe that there is some intention to propose not only a social impact but also political impact. In reality, The Singapore government has faced a lot of demands to require more democracy and equality from people because their political system is based on the dictatorship. Their majority political party has dominated since 1959 and still, there is no rival political party. So, for reducing the political demand from people, the Singapore government has opened the next goal of their nations and suggested significant results which has biased information and data for dispersing people's political interest into other issues.

By the way, the government is a main power for social innovation in many countries especially in the Asia because this special organization has most powerful methods to bring a huge impact to society such as a law, money and well trained public organization to execute their plan. So, when the government's direction and intention for innovation and development are decent, the result is excellent like many successful developing economy cases around the Asia.

However, sometimes or many times, the government has made wrong policies and programs. There are many reasons for this unhappy results such as limited resources, uncleared action and too much ambitious plan. Distinguishably and Sadly, unlike the failure of company, the government's fail is more serious and wide and brings huge pain to people. Think about the current status of the Greek. Their out-focused economy policy produces severe suffering not only economic side but entire their society. Greek people have to observe many new regulations from EU like cutting welfare budget and taking high interest rate that make their life more harder.

As a result, figuring out the method for measuring the real impact from social innovation and analyze the real purpose and intention of innovative policy are huge important for us because in the government section, we have to have a method to prevent a wrong policy and program since it has significant impacts to our life in both positive and negative way. So, to prevent this bad situation, for playing a role against the government, we have to measure what is wrong and suggest more logical argument by a measuring tool which has common sense to ordinary people.

Preference list :

http://sroi.london.edu/Measuring-Social-Impact.pdf
http://www.iesingapore.gov.sg/Media-Centre/News/2013/7/Encouraging-entrepreneurship
http://www.mansfieldfdn.org/backup/programs/program_pdfs/ent_singapore.pdf
http://www.gemconsortium.org/docs/download/587