Empowering People through Social Innovation: Policy Suggestions

Social innovation is an idea that works for the public good. It recognises the challenges but looks at the opportunity for that are sustainable. Social innovation focuses on solutions. India is a diverse country with various problems and challenges. We need social innovation to face such challenges. Social innovations come from three levels – individual, organisation or group and government levels. Consider, for example, the idea of Grameen Model by Mohammad Yunus, which created the tremendous impact on women. It provided both social and economic protection on a larger scale. At the same time, some social innovation initiatives started by the students at the university level to provide solar power to remote village and initiated income generation programmes for Dalit villages in Visakhapatnam district created sustainable solutions for major social challenges. On the other side, there are social innovations for environmental protections. Hence, the results of social innovations are all around us.

This paper will concentrate on the theoretical understanding of social innovations – it includes the definition of social innovation, lists various stages in social innovation and describes the design, implementation, failures and success of social innovation. It also includes few case studies related to social innovations and suggestions for encouraging social innovations in India.