Social Innovation And Community Engagement: Practical Aspects In Essay.

In this assessment you are required to consider theoretical and practical aspects of social innovation.

You are free to choose an existing community organisation and create a social innovation for their client group or you can develop an entirely new concept that you are passionate about.

You need to consider the following issues: the common good, financial, environmental and ethical implications and implementation challenges.

Approaches to this assessment will be discussed at the Workshop in Week 4.

A suggested structure for your report follows

• Executive Summary 
• Discussion of social innovation and community engagement theory 
• Description of your proposed social innovation and how your social innovation contributes to the common good 
• Conduct a SWOT, PESTLE and offer discussion on the possible funding and ethical implications of your social
• Overview and briefly discuss the challenges for implementation 

Social Innovation and Community Engagement Theory

Developing societies are facing challenges with basic needs of food and water, housing and energy. Increase in population is intensifying the challenges. The problems of sustainable development, distribution of energy and energy security are interlinked with each other and therefore a new idea or innovation is required to address the societal challenges. The social environment is rapidly changing with the want of sustainable economic development and stable democracies. Scientists and engineers play vital role in social innovation and helps in addressing the social needs and challenges of the people. Social innovation is the adoption, integration development and creation of new practices and concepts that creates a better world (Cajaiba-Santana 2014). The innovation gives most importance to people and planet. Social innovation involves steps that focus on people health, community development, education and working conditions. Researches revealed that people residing in a society are the main components of society that leads to social development. Social innovation focusses more on the needs of people rather than profit of business (Voorberg, Bekkers and Tummers 2015). The process of innovation can take place within a government, profit as well as non-profit sector and within the spaces between them. It existed in the past in the form of Charters school, fair trade, community-centred planning, plans for conserving habitats, investing as a part of social responsibility and supported employment.

Community engagement is necessary for social innovations (Moulaert 2016). It is defined as the participation or involvement of people in specific activities that aims for creating a better world. As described earlier that people residing in a society are the major components that help in developing the society and bringing positive changes in it. A wide range body works to explore community engagement theory that revealed participation and practical experience are the stepping-stones of social success. Social innovation and community engagement are interconnected with each other. The two factors that determine community engagement are how broad and how deep the concept of social innovation is (Baldus, Voorhees and Calantone 2015). If cause of social innovation is for the betterment of society active community engagement can be achieved. According to the theory of community engagement, to increase community involvement public should have the balanced and objective information that will help them in understanding the problems, opportunities and alternatives (Brodie et al. 2013). Public feedback is significantly important for analysing the solutions and taking correct decisions. Active involvement with the public is required to know their needs and aspirations. Collaborating with public in each aspects of decision that includes identifying the correct solution and alternatives for meeting the social challenges (O'Mara-Eves et al. 2013). Empowering public with final decision-making helps in winning their trust that indirectly influence the society.  

Figure 1: Wheel of participation

(Source: Pickering et al. 2015)

To ensure active participation of people four points should be kept in mind. They are empowering, informing, participation and consulting.

Social entrepreneurship is an important contribution to social innovation. It is a non-profit sector and includes neither profit sector nor public organisations. It creates new social values through innovative approaches and introduces new ways of achieving goals. It brings new patterns and possibilities for innovation and believes in doing things that the organisation thinks cannot be done. Social entrepreneurship is defined as the use of new start-ups and other entrepreneurs for funding, developing and implementing solutions to meet the social, cultural and environmental challenges. It broadens the goals of the society, culture and environment in areas of health care and community development. Social entrepreneurship became popular in late 2010’s. Internet was widely used for uplifting the social innovation, like social networking and social media sites (Habibi, Laroche and Richard 2014.). These platforms help the social entrepreneurs to communicate to large number of people who are geographically far away from each other to share ideas and focus on the same goals. People of various communities can discuss about their issues, events and activities via the platform along with raising funds through crowdfunding. Social innovations like social entrepreneurship and social enterprises are comparatively new to the world. Therefore, they are facing lots of challenges.

Proposed Social Innovation and its contribution to common good

According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the basic needs of the people are food, clothing and shelter. Micro entrepreneurs help in transforming the way of food, shelter and society. They contribute to the society by educating the people, developing humans and teaching them about home cleanliness. They also cater to the health needs of the society. Small and micro entrepreneurs have proven themselves to satisfy the basic needs of the people as mentioned by Maslow. Researchers argue that entrepreneur catalyses social changes and addresses social needs of people keeping behind their financial benefits as an entrepreneur. They train the minds of people in such a way that they become capable of tolerating risks. Social entrepreneurs change the way of thinking of people such that new ideas for innovation come in their mind, they become mentally strong and develop the capability of facing any type of challenges whether it be social, cultural or environmental challenges. It can be concluded that social entrepreneurs has a vital role to play in the upliftment of society and providing solutions to the social issues faced by the people residing in a society. They take care of the basic needs of people proposed in Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

SWOT analysis determines the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats of social entrepreneurship. The strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats are discussed below:

Strengths:

• Expert opinion and solutions given by entrepreneurs.
• Has the ability to train minds of people (Singh 2014).
• Is society friendly

Weaknesses:

• If an entrepreneur lack experience then the motive of changing the society will not be successful.
• Social entrepreneurship is a new term and therefore lacks reputation.

Opportunities:

• Has the capability to move the society fast.
• Gives unique solution.
• The world is in need of same kind of services.

Threats:

• The potential threat of social entrepreneurship is the availability of same type of business in the market.

PESTLE analysis will determine the political, economic, social, technological, legal and environmental factors of social entrepreneurship. The political issues that they face are related to the regulatory reforms and immigration taxes. Researchers have found that new legislations has the capability to change the life of entrepreneur. Social innovations are also governed by economic factors (Zalengera et al. 2014). Economy is positively affected by entrepreneurs. They provide new employment to people and facilitates remote working. Entrepreneurs help in the growth of communities. They affect the social needs of people changing the way of their living, food habits and their buying behaviours (Moulaert 2016). Advancement in technology like the invention of internet has influenced entrepreneurs significantly. They gained popularity across the globe with the help of social networking and social media websites. Email and live chat services has helped them to be known among the public.  

Ethics and values governs a social work and therefore, the social entrepreneurs should abide by the code of ethics while doing social work. Social entrepreneurs undergo the following ethical issues according to the ethical standards proposed in the NASW code of ethics: (a) social workers often fail to maintain commitment to their customers and (b) payment of the service offered by them (Zalengera et al. 2014). As the field of social entrepreneurship is growing significantly fast the ethical dilemmas will continue to bother the entrepreneurs and therefore, there is a need to resolve the issues related to it. According to NASW code of ethics, the social entrepreneur must give a customer’s interests first priority. However, in addition to paying attention to regulatory agencies, media, funding sources and so forth, the administrators of social work need to respond to various stakeholders (Choi and Majumdar 2014). Social entrepreneurs should take a sincere effort so as to balance their commitments to external stakeholders as well as to their clients simultaneously. There is no way to deal with the ethical dilemmas related to social entrepreneurship and therefore, they continuously face the ethical and funding issues. A committee should be established that would review the performance of the social entrepreneurs so that they can address the ethical dilemmas because without such commitment, the entrepreneur will lose sight of the social aspect of social entrepreneurship.

Social entrepreneurship is a completely new paradigm to the people. Therefore, it has to undergo certain challenges while it is being implemented in the society. The challenges faced by them are discussed below:

• Managing cash flow: Money is essential for developing any small or medium sized business yet the entrepreneurs strive to pay the bills (Von Schomberg 2013). They do not give priority to profits however, minimum amount of money is required for their survival and carrying out their operation.
• Employee hiring: When the social entrepreneurs become popular it becomes difficult to manage all the operations alone. Therefore, they hire employees to assist them in their work (Renko 2013). However, most of the people are not interested in this field and therefore, the entrepreneurs face challenges while implementing the concept in the society.
• Time Management: It is another major challenge faced by the entrepreneurs who has gained popularity. Therefore, the solution to this challenge is making smart use of time by distributing tasks among the assistants.
• While implementing entrepreneurship in the society, entrepreneurs faces challenge in delegating tasks as everything is messed up. The solution to this problem is proper time management.
• Identifying the social needs of the people is yet another challenge that the social entrepreneurs faces. Right needs and challenges should be identified in order to address them correctly. This requires in depth research of the society.
• The other challenges faced by the social entrepreneurs are raising funds to expand service across the people in the world, self-doubt and lacking confidence in one self.

References:

Baldus, B.J., Voorhees, C. and Calantone, R., 2015. Online brand community engagement: Scale development and validation. Journal of Business Research, 68(5), pp.978-985.

Benard, M.C. and Victor, K.R., 2013. SWOT analysis of growth of women entrepreneurs in Dar es Salaam. Academic Research International, 4(1), p.50.

Brodie, R.J., Ilic, A., Juric, B. and Hollebeek, L., 2013. Consumer engagement in a virtual brand community: An exploratory analysis. Journal of business research, 66(1), pp.105-114.

Cajaiba-Santana, G., 2014. Social innovation: Moving the field forward. A conceptual framework. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 82, pp.42-51.

Choi, N. and Majumdar, S., 2014. Social entrepreneurship as an essentially contested concept: Opening a new avenue for systematic future research. Journal of business venturing, 29(3), pp.363-376.

Dees, J.G., 2017. 1 The Meaning of Social Entrepreneurship. In Case Studies in Social Entrepreneurship and Sustainability (pp. 34-42). Routledge.

Doherty, B., Haugh, H. and Lyon, F., 2014. Social enterprises as hybrid organizations: A review and research agenda. International Journal of Management Reviews, 16(4), pp.417-436.

Habibi, M.R., Laroche, M. and Richard, M.O., 2014. The roles of brand community and community engagement in building brand trust on social media. Computers in Human Behavior, 37, pp.152-161.

Lepoutre, J., Justo, R., Terjesen, S. and Bosma, N., 2013. Designing a global standardized methodology for measuring social entrepreneurship activity: the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor social entrepreneurship study. Small Business Economics, 40(3), pp.693-714.

Moulaert, F., 2016. Social innovation: Institutionally embedded, territorially (re) produced. In Social innovation and territorial development (pp. 27-40). Routledge.

O'Mara-Eves, A., Brunton, G., McDaid, G., Oliver, S., Kavanagh, J., Jamal, F., Matosevic, T., Harden, A. and Thomas, J., 2013. Community engagement to reduce inequalities in health: a systematic review, meta-analysis and economic analysis. Public Health Research, 1(4).

Pickering, D.M., Horrocks, L.M., Visser, K.S. and Todd, G.L., 2015. Analysing mosaic data by a ‘Wheel of Participation’to explore physical activities and cycling with children and youth with cerebral palsy. International Journal of Developmental Disabilities, 61(1), pp.41-48.

Renko, M., 2013. Early challenges of nascent social entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurship theory and practice, 37(5), pp.1045-1069.

Singh, A., 2014. Role of Women Entrepreneurs in India: A SWOT Analysis. International Journal of Management and International Business Studies, ISSN 2277-3177 Volume, 4, pp.231-238.

Von Schomberg, R., 2013. A vision of responsible research and innovation. Responsible innovation: Managing the responsible emergence of science and innovation in society, pp.51-74.

Voorberg, W.H., Bekkers, V.J. and Tummers, L.G., 2015. A systematic review of co-creation and co-production: Embarking on the social innovation journey. Public Management Review, 17(9), pp.1333-1357.

Zalengera, C., Blanchard, R.E., Eames, P.C., Juma, A.M., Chitawo, M.L. and Gondwe, K.T., 2014. Overview of the Malawi energy situation and A PESTLE analysis for sustainable development of renewable energy. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 38, pp.335-347.