Can Social Innovation be more Inclusive?

When I contemplate the future of social innovation, I don’t necessarily focus on the impressive technological advances, such as flying cars or green cities. I wonder how the field of innovation will become more innovative itself. I began to think more about the exclusivity of the field after reading “De-Colonizing Social Innovation” by Jackie Copeland Carson, the research director for the Institute for the Future. Over this half of the semester we’ve read many articles and watched videos exposing us to numerous social innovators. Yet the field still does not strike me as particularly inclusive. Not all, but many of these innovators are examples of the “rich westerner” solving the problems of the poor in developing countries. While we’ve gotten better at trying to understand the culture and circumstances of the people we strive to serve, there still seems to be restrictions on who can participate in social innovation. Only those with understanding of advanced technologies and/or access to significant capital are able to see their ideas create impact. How can we make the field more accessible to those we are trying so hard to help?

While reading about Masdar, I found it particularly interesting that some of the architecture innovation were reexaminations of historical city plans and ways that indigenous peoples were living in order to combat the climate without expensive technologies. These low income communities were able to find solutions for themselves without the intervention of more knowledgeable and tech savvy foreigners. How can we learn from this historic example? How can the innovative solutions in practice in low income and low technology communities be included in the canon of social innovation? How can these unknown everyday innovators be included in the growing field of social innovation?