QUICK READS
Quick Reads are short overviews of key NetZeroCities concepts providing essential information in a practical and visual way. More comprehensive resources and additional information will be available in the knowledge repository.
SOCIAL INNOVATION FOR CLIMATE-NEUTRALITY
Social innovation tackles the societal challenges thats is reaching climate-neutrality with a bottom-up, collaborative, holistic and human-centred approach to innovation. It uses prototyping and quick experimentation to create new products, services or business models that improve community wellbeing, prosperity and promote behavioural change. It is a practice which works most effectively with a systems innovation mindset to generate holistic solutions and an environment favouring social change.
Social innovation complements technical innovation to help cities accelerate their transition to climate-neutrality. It ensures the consideration of economic development and overall wellbeing of people and planet at every step of the transition to net zero. It reinforces the co-benefits of climate mitigation such as improved public health, job creation, public budget savings among others. Social innovation creates new business models and builds the local capacity to address decarbonisation challenges. It creates ways for multiple actors to co-design and co-produce solutions contributing to decarbonisation. It also supports positive behavioural changes by responding to local needs and acting within cultural context.
Social innovation complements technical innovation to help cities accelerate their transition to climate-neutrality. It ensures the consideration of economic development and overall wellbeing of people and planet at every step of the transition to net zero. It reinforces the co-benefits of climate mitigation such as improved public health, job creation, public budget savings among others. Social innovation creates new business models and builds the local capacity to address decarbonisation challenges. It creates ways for multiple actors to co-design and co-produce solutions contributing to decarbonisation. It also supports positive behavioural changes by responding to local needs and acting within cultural context.
Key principles for cities to harness Social Innovation in their transition
Adopt a collaborative and human-centred approach
By engaging people – from school children, front line city staff, entrepreneurs, associations or NGOs to policymakers – social innovations respond to complex challenges with practical, lived experience in order to better articulate diverse individual and collective needs and potential co-benefits connected to a societal challenge. This helps cities accelerate emission reductions by engaging more effectively with local actors on climate goals and by generating practical new solutions together.
Address unmet social needs
Transitioning to climate neutrality changes how needs, both new and old, should be met. Social innovation provides the new ideas and solutions necessary for people to adopt different ways of living and consuming, satisfying both their needs and the urgency of shifting to climate-neutrality. We are seeing socially innovative business models help cities serve both people and the planet in mutually beneficial ways.
Enable an ecosystem
Cities are filled with different actors, cultures, backgrounds and ways of doing things. Cities across Europe create the local conditions that empower this diversity of people - residents, businesses, civic organisations - to drive change and innovation. Environmental, economic and social needs can be met autonomously from the ground-up, by people acting as entrepreneurs, within their unique context and culture. This way, cities become a platform for climate transformation, with greater capacity for collective action across their diverse communities. This fosters more inclusive, adaptive and resilient local ecosystems in the face of climate change and other global risks.
Inspiration
City Labs
City Labs as (community) experimentation hubs in service of city missions, bring different actors together to deliver a portfolio of actions from a needs/benefit perspective (i.e. solving existing needs that support a specific mission) and help change mindsets about identified problems (Valencia - Las Naves; Bristol City Lab; Mannheim City Lab; Leuven 2030 Urban Lab)
City as a platform
An open platform (digital and physical – often paired with neighbourhood labs) is powered by the city to promote and empower – through resources and spaces – an ecosystem to support entrepreneurship, social impact investment and community development. The platform brings together public and private, profit and non-profit actors to strengthen the city’s response to pressing needs and social challenges with an integrated – top-down and bottom-up – systemic approach (Torino, Bologna, Brescia, Helsinki).
City Roadmaps
City Roadmaps to achieve Net Zero are paired with specific programs led by facilitators who translate plans into concrete actions and impact (specifically engaging citizens in the process) for the city and its various actors (Leuven).
#WirvsVirus
An Open Social Innovation initiative that mobilised people from all sectors (civil society, government and private sector) to address the COVID-19 crisis. The programme consisted of a 48-hr hackathon to develop ideas and an implementation programme (130 teams for 6-months) to support social innovators to turn ideas into solutions. #WirVsVirus identified pressing challenges related to COVID-19, such as how to quickly digitalize health-care services, how to help citizens of all ages to cope with lockdown-induced isolation, and how to respond to increasing instances of domestic violence. Twenty-eight thousand citizens with a broad spectrum of personal and professional backgrounds participated. (Here for lessons learned; here for Policy Brief; and here for more examples).
Going further (additional resources)
- Nesta’s Sustainable Future Mission: projects and thought leadership on social innovation and net zero emissions
- Examples of social innovations contributing to net zero emissions
- Schwab Foundation of Social Entrepreneurship Impact Report: while limited to the social innovations in their network, it shows how social innovation contributes to societal challenges, climate goals and systems change
- SISCODE: repository of learning material, tools and other resources for co-creation
- Better Incubation Training Modules: three online courses related to social innovation
- Acumen and Ideo.org’s Introduction to Human-Centered Design: online course on the human-centered design process
- Design for Social Innovation: Case Studies from Around the World: book for designers working in Social Innovation with roundtable discussions and case studies to promote the practice
- The Better Entrepreneurship Policy Tool: assessments and resources to help policymakers understand how and where they can support social entrepreneurs
- Building common urban futures: City Labs for urban energy transitions. This guide is based on experiences from Labs aiming at facilitation, development, and support of social innovations in energy (SIE).