Europe's Social Innovation Revolution: From Crisis Response To Systemic Transformation

[Celerity]

Bold investment in social innovation is essential if Europe wants to tackle twenty-first-century challenges beyond market and state solutions.

https://www.socialeurope.eu/europes-social-innovation-revolution-from-crisis-response-to-systemic-transformation



Social innovation has emerged from the margins to become a defining force in contemporary policy debates. As a novel approach to addressing complex problems in global health, social care, education, energy and environmental policy, social innovation has captured the imagination of stakeholders and communities at local, regional and national levels. This widespread uptake is reflected in the proliferation of public programmes that initiate, support and analyse social innovation across diverse policy arenas.

This quiet revolution represents more than incremental reform. Social innovation has catalysed a fundamental rethinking of innovation itself—one that opens up to society and thrives on interaction between diverse actors from civil society, business, politics and science. These stakeholders collaborate on the ideation, implementation and diffusion of new social practices and institutions, working from different sectoral perspectives with diverging objectives, yet often in profoundly co-creative ways. In this sense, social innovation emerges as a distinctive mode of social change and transformation, particularly vital when markets and politics fail to deliver solutions.

For nearly two decades, the European Union has been experimenting with embedding social innovation into its political DNA. This was never about apps or gadgets, but about reimagining welfare provision, building inclusive economies and tackling problems that neither market mechanisms nor state intervention could solve alone.

From Financial Crisis to Climate Emergency

The journey began in earnest with the 2006-2007 financial crisis. European leaders discovered that traditional innovation policy was insufficient to address the multiple, complex and interrelated global challenges confronting contemporary societies. The old political instruments and strategies proved too blunt, too narrow or too fragile for the task at hand.

snip

[slightlv]

1. I truly hope once we have government firmly back into democratic hands,

that we study and critical examine what has and/or has not worked in other countries... especially the social democratic countries. The U.S., while ostensibly in the category of "1st world" status is far, far behind the amenities, liberties and rights, as well as "living there" questionnaires from citizens.

Medicare for All...
More vacation each year
Vacation and sick days for every worker, including when adding a new family member.

These are things I can think of just off the top of my head. If we're going to have to remake government because of all of trump's destruction, we might as well put in place *for us* what we gave other countries during the Marshall Plan, etc., IMO.