Social innovation Canada

This method provides a set of tools that can help accelerate innovation by scaling it up. By bringing people together and building capacity this approach enables practitioners to make a greater impact with their innovations. Moreover, the method aims to address short-term thinking in policy planning by facilitating knowledge building. This can help ensure that policies are informed by a more comprehensive understanding of the challenges and opportunities that exist in the long-term, thereby fostering more effective solutions. Overall, this approach seeks to empower innovators to create sustainable, scalable solutions that can drive positive change in society.

Currently, there are good ideas for social innovations, but there needs to be more connection between actors and capacity building to accelerate the innovations. The purpose of SI Canada is therefore to bring together these actors and offer a toolset for knowledge and capabilities.

Stakeholder participation is defined through the regional nodes. Regional perspective means being more connected to local ecosystems and actors.

The main goal of Social Innovation Canada is to create a collaborative infrastructure that supports experiments, prototypes, and learning in the field of social innovation. This is achieved through the implementation of three key bodies: constellation governance, regional nodes, and shared knowledge platforms.

1) Constellation governance

This involves multi-organization collaboration within dynamic and complex systems. This approach empowers regional communities and allows decision-making to happen on regional, national, and global levels. Agile action groups of people and organizations combine their own interests to achieve collective impact. A project secretariat is responsible for aligning and coordinating efforts, facilitating decision-making, mobilizing fundraising, finding efficiencies, financial management, and coordinating the overall project work plan. A stewardship group ensures institutional operations and decision-making, while a guardians group provides advice, support, and collective intelligence.

2) Regional nodes

These are front-line operators in SI Canada and are important for creating a locally legitimate and inclusive network. There are six regional nodes that explore regional needs and opportunities, take part in regional ecosystem mapping, host convening, and participate in the capacity-building of practitioners.

3) A shared digital knowledge exchange platform

The platform facilitates learning and aggregates data and stories. Members can participate in online groups, peer circles, create and post jobs, news and events, search for knowledge, and find each other. The platform consists of six thematic constellations: Labs Community of Practice, Developmental evaluation, Corporate Social Innovation Community of Practice, Social R&D, Indigenous Social Innovation, and Transformative Leadership.

There are also three strategic pillars which describe the best way to implement the changes through these bodies described above:

1.      Navigation, Wayfinding, Connections

The key purpose for navigation, wayfinding, and connections methods are ecosystem mapping, branding and website. They are for creating pathways into social innovation and make it easier for innovators to find each other. Regional Ecosystem mapping is to establish a baseline and determine where collective energy is for moving forward. Each region will map their local social innovation ecosystem and this way the national picture of social innovations in Canada is presented. Branding and website are ways to create visibility on the network for the wider public.

2.      Capacity-Building and Convening

Capacity-building and convening strengthens individuals, organizations and sector capacity by facilitating access to social innovations. Key tactics for this are 101 training engaging the regional constellations, convenings for collaboration and shared learning, adaptation and planning the work. There are regional and national convenings and also a specific governance team dedicated to this.

3.      Sharing stories, data and building knowledge

Knowledge building and data sharing is meant for elevating the field and scaling up the impact. This is done via storytelling platforms and impact dashboard. The UN Sustainable Development Goals are the framework for seeing the impact and also evaluating it. The content shared to the outside is done through email, groups and social media. There is cooperation with external media, news agencies and journalists in this case in the Canadian framework for sharing the results.

In a climate neutrality, the constellation governance could take the form of a local consortium, in which the relevant stakeholders are represented. Here, the regional nodes would most likely need to be established on a neighbourhood level, where local initiatives could take responsibility for ecosystem mapping. The thematic constellations in the knowledge exchange platform could be adjusted to address issues that are relevant to climate neutrality, such as sustainble energy generation. If the platform is set up to address wider sustainability challenges, the climate neutrality itself could be one of the themes, along with other broader themes, such as mobility, greenery, (social) safety. ​​​​​​​