The first week of May 2015, will forever be an impressive week for Elon Musk. If you don’t know who he is, then here is brief Bio, he cofounded PayPal, is the chairman of SolarCity, founder of SpaceX and is the CEO of Tesla Motors. In the span of a week, SpaceX successfully launched and tested their launch abort system, while Tesla announced and sold out their powerwall battery in a few days. The Powerwall battery is meant to store both solar and non-solar power. The Powerwall has many advantages. It can allow persons, who are not connected to power grid collect, store and use energy. Tesla claims that the Powerwall can power the average home for eight hours. In the press conference, Musk stated, “Our goal is to fundamentally change the way the world uses energy.”
How is innovation different from social innovation?
The Powerwall is a wonderful example of an innovation that is not yet a social innovation. There is little debate that renewable technologies like the Powerwall are going disrupt existing markets. It is also disruptive enough that few people will care if we call it a social innovation or not. Although there is no agreed upon definition of social innovation, many authors describe it as being an activity that generates good for society. Many academics, myself included as trying to resist the tendency to engage in social innovation washing – organizations claiming to be socially innovative when in they are not.
When an organization describes an innovation as being a social innovation, they are often missing the very important nuance that all human activity is inherently social. Any activity where humans work together if it is to produce value for society or not is also a social activity. What few people realize is that all innovations are social. For many people, the word social seems to imply that if something is good for society, then we must insert the word social somewhere. Something that is socially innovative should be more than just good for the world. I argue elsewhere that social innovations should:
- Change existing patterns within a social system.
- Change the way resources flow within social systems.
- Change our power relations.
- Change our social interactions.
What can be confusing is that disruptive innovations can also change existing patterns and resources flows, but do not necessarily affect our social interactions or our power relations. Take Uber as an example. Uber is undoubtedly one of the most disruptive technologies the world has seen in recent years. In many ways what Uber is doing is not much different from what we have been doing in the past. That is, hiring cabs or taxi’s to take us from point A to B. What Uber has changed is who is driving the car, how we Hail a cab and how we pay for that service. They have democratized and reduced the bureaucracy for someone who wants to make a few extra dollars as a taxi driver.
Tesla’s Powerwall is similar to Uber. It allows us to continue driving cars or use electricity in our houses in the same way we have grown accustomed. It is the same activity that has brought us to the edge of a climate crisis. The difference is that Tesla has provided us with access and the potential to use clean energy. Tesla’s Powerwall or car does not change our social relation or social interactions.
The key to an innovation becoming a social innovation is that it should change our social system in a way that changes how we socialize. That’s why we have the word social in the title. The Internet, for example, has changed our social interactions. The speed at which we can communicate, the expectation that you are accessible by email after work hours, the way we use social networks to organize social events. Innovations like Kiva, Bitcoin, AirBnB all demonstrate how the Internet acts as a platform for changing who and how resources are controlled or distributed. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) and Google searching have changed the ease with which we can access and share information. The internet has provided a platform for online groups like Anonymous and other Hacktivist groups to use the internet as a social justice tool. These groups hack organizations that they perceive to be violating citizens rights in some way and force them to comply with socially justice practices.
The Internet has had an enormous impact on our social interactions and power relations. In thinking about social innovation, it is important to remember that if an innovation does not affect the way we socialize, then maybe, just maybe, it is not yet a social innovation.
Image downloaded from Flickr user: Scutter the image was titled windmills