As we saw in our previous post, social innovations are new solutions to social problems whose ultimate goal is to deliver positive impact to society. But how do we know if we are successfully fulfilling this purpose?
Social Impact Assessment (SIA) constitutes the process of: “analysing, monitoring and managing the economic, social and environmental consequences of business activity, both positive and negative, independently of the intentionality of the activity”[1]. Unlike environmental or economic impact evaluations, which are mainly ex-ante analyses to predict the effect of a given plan or project, social impact assessment is usually carried out to evaluate an activity in progress or as an ex-post evaluation of an intervention.
When conducted adequately, social impact assessment can be a useful tool for external stakeholders’ accountability, internal decision making as well as performance evaluation. But despite the general consensus on the importance of assessing impact, many organisations do not analyse their impact regularly. It is mainly because one of these reasons:

• Some organisations do not yet recognise the value of Social Impact Assessment and they are still not requested to do it by their funders.
• Others would like to evaluate their impact but lack the resources to do it. Despite its benefits, Social Impact Assessment is a time-consuming and labour-intensive task that can be difficult to assume by smaller organisations.
• For others, the challenge may lie in how to do it. The breadth of existing methods and tools to measure impact presents a confusing panorama, and the diversity of organisations pursuing a social mission makes it impossible to have a one-size-fits-all solution.

Even for organisations with the necessary capacity and the will, measuring social impact effectively but efficiently remains a complex issue. A recent survey in the non-profit sector showed that 50% of organisations are struggling with impact evaluation, which was considered as the top challenge that the non-profit sector faces today by the nearly 3,000 respondents of the survey[2].

Source: Meehan and Jonker (2017) Stanford Survey on Leadership and Management in the Nonprofit Sector
 
If you are one of these organisations having difficulties navigating the Social Impact Assessment landscape, we are here to help you. Limitless has the expertise to guide you through it and find the way that suits your organisation’s ambitions and resources. Feel free to contact us with any question you may have. Also, get in touch if you would like to collaborate with us on this topic.

​Limitless is also developing the Social Innovation Academy. Get in touch if you would like to join our global Advisory Board.

[1] Florman, Klingler-Vidra and Facada. (2016). A critical evaluation of social impact assessment methodologies and a call to measure economic and social impact holistically through the External Rate of Return platform.

[2] Stanford Survey on Leadership and Management in the Nonprofit Sector

Social innovation is “a novel solution to a social problem that is more effective, efficient, or sustainable than existing solutions and for which the value created accrues primarily to society as a whole rather than private individuals[1]”.
But what’s new about social innovation? Well, social innovation is becoming mainstream innovation. It is no longer limited to non-profits and NGOs trying to alleviate a problem in their community. It is becoming a regular approach for governments and companies that realize that social innovation is good business and good for the business.
Of course we all know about Grameen Bank, the microcredit pioneer that transformed the banking industry in developing countries, but fewer people may know about the network of 542 towns and cities in 52 countries experimenting with participatory democracy on a local scale[2] and about the crucial role that social innovation will have in the next generation of European public policies[3], or that Social Innovation Summit 2017 gathered in Chicago more than 1,000 professionals from the corporate world looking for the next big idea.
And it is also not any more about developed countries exporting ideas to developing regions. We can increasingly see great examples emerged in less-developed countries that have full applicability in developed countries, such as the advertising billboard developed in Peru that turns humid air into usable water, or the world-leading mobile-money system developed by M-PESA in Kenya.
Social companies usually fall into one of these categories: a) those trying to meet a social need with their activity (such as Sanergy, that provides affordable sanitation in Africa's informal settlements) or b) the ones inserting social values at the core of a “regular” business (such as Ilunion, that carries out its business activities in five divisions incorporating workers with disabilities)
Just to give you an idea of the current size of the social innovation market, only 208 of the world’s leading impact investing organizations manage nearly USD 114 billion in impact assets[4] and the capital available for impact investment keeps growing exponentially year over year (see figure below).

Source: Global Impact Investing Network 2017 Annual Impact Investor Survey

​However, although the social innovation progress seems to be unstoppable, there are still some areas that need further attention to prop up this growth.

The first one is the challenge of how to measure the impact that is being generated by these social innovations (we will dedicate a further post to this topic later on). The second is the need for specific training to help those involved in this field improve the skills and competences needed to successfully develop sustainable and scalable social innovations.

​To tackle the latter issue, Limitless together with ICAN (the publisher of Harvard Business Review Poland) and 3 other partners have recently started a project aiming to develop the first online Social Innovation Academy in Europe. If you are interested in keeping up with this project, you can subscribe to our newsletter or follow us on social media (LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook).

We are also looking for experts willing to join the Social Innovation Academy global advisory board, so if you are interested get in touch with us.