Michael F. Shaughnessy
Eastern New Mexico University
Portales, New Mexico

Gigi Georges is a Managing Director of the Glover Park Group, specializing in strategic communications, policy advocacy, and planning for business, industries and nonprofits. She worked previously as the Communications Director for the New York City Department of Education under Mayor Michael Bloomberg, as a Special Assistant to the President in the Clinton White House, and as Senator Hillary Clinton’s State Director.  As a Kennedy School Ash Center Fellow in 2008-2009, Georges worked with Professor Goldsmith to identify best practices in social innovation. Georges received a B.A. Phi Beta Kappa from Wellesley College and an M.P.A. from Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson School of International Affairs, and is a Ph.D. candidate at NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service.

In this interview, she responds to questions about social innovation and social change.

1)    Gigi, you are one of the co-authors of a recent book on social innovation. First of all, how did you get involved with the book and how do you define “ social innovation”?

For some time, I’ve been interested in better understanding the potential of education innovations to help improve public schools—and have both studied innovative school reforms and worked in New York City on both the management and union side to help further them. I was pleased to be able to spend a year as a Visiting Fellow at Harvard Kennedy School, working with Stephen Goldsmith and Tim Glynn Burke to test those ideas and explore how a common set of innovation principles can be applied not only to education, but to a broad array of social policy challenges.

Our work together, and with a broader group of effective social innovators that the Knight Foundation brought together at Harvard, led us to envision the promise and power of social innovation to act as a catalytic force in social policy. We saw first-hand and through interviews with more than 100 leading innovators that effective social innovation happens when individuals reach across sectors—public, private and nonprofit—to develop creative, results-based solutions that lead to bold and transformative change.  We also saw how social innovation can take hold in large scale and meaningful ways when it gives citizens real choices and provides a compelling alternative to the dominant government approach to existing social service delivery systems.

2)      What do YOU consider to be the most pervasive social problems of our generation?

So many social challenges are interrelated—poverty, education, housing, and so on—that it can be hard to separate out a single most pervasive problem. But I’d have to say that our inability to give our students the best possible education lies at the heart of the matter. If, as a nation, we can give students the education they need to succeed in work and life, to be productive and engaged citizens, and to contribute to our economy in meaningful ways, we will have gone a long way toward addressing the broader matrix of social policy challenges we face. 

In the Power of Social Innovation, we hope to contribute to this effort in a small way by shining a light on the many ways innovation can be a force for effective change. In education, for example, we see everything from Wireless Generation’s use of handheld technology to empower teachers to better manage and track student assessments, interpret data, and apply their findings to better instruction to Mayor Bloomberg’s top to bottom reforms in New York City, where, among other things, he has infused the school system with catalytic talent from non-traditional areas, expanded choice through small schools and charters, and granted school leaders more authority and autonomy to innovation.  

3)   Our society is becoming increasingly intricate, computerized, complex and electronic. What kinds of innovations do the schools have to do to keep up with these trends?

Wireless Generation’s work, mentioned above, provides a great example of the difference technology can make when you have innovators like Larry Berger who take the time and effort to understand what teachers need and give it to them in a way that empowers them to do better for and with their students. 

More broadly, one of the biggest challenges—and one that many state and district superintendents are grappling with—is how to manage all the student achievement and other data it has been amassing these past years, particularly under NCLB. The Race to the Top competition, which itself is a powerful incentivizing innovation, has helped ignite thinking across the states on how to create more innovative technology solutions to help states, districts, and schools understand the data, put it to use to tailor instruction in more individualized ways, and improve broad practices to increase student achievement across schools and districts.

4)      What do you consider as best practices in social innovation?

In the book, we outline a number of core “best practices” or levers that can markedly increase the performance and potential of our social efforts. Here are a few that work across the policy spectrum:

Set aside risk capital. President Obama and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg have both partnered with private philanthropy to create innovation funds. In its own way, each fund creates the political space (as important as financial) to test and incubate or to help replicate new models that have been measured and shown to work.

Focus on results. A new generation of funders, both private and public, is less and less impressed with the best efforts of good hearted nonprofits. Instead, they insist on results and are gaining the courage to repurpose dollars to what works. Public dissatisfaction with an underperforming status quo, and subsequent demands for change, are levers that help funders to overcome opposition from politically connected incumbent providers.

Trust in citizens. Too many nonprofit and government “experts” assume that those seeking assistance will always be in need and have little to offer. Many of the most exciting innovations we came across give clients choices and hold them to high expectations. A great example of this is Maurice Miller’s San Francisco-based Family Independence Initiative, which empowers low-income families to use their own networks to become more economically self-sufficient.

Support local successes. While looking outside for worthy models is helpful, more and more communities are incubating local innovation by helping grow exceptional programs already succeeding in their own neighborhoods.

Stop social protectionism. Elected officials, particularly city councilors or state legislators, often protect existing programs, no matter how ineffective, through budget earmarks and regulatory hurdles. Bringing down these hurdles allows more innovators to access existing funding.

5)      What role or roles do you see the schools playing in social innovation, or should they primarily be concerned with education?

If we really want to create and sustain effective schools, we should recognize that embracing both roles is integral to the work of schools. Innovative tools and practices, such as streamlined management, cross-sector partnerships, technology, school choice, and the creation of a strong results-oriented culture can be powerful vehicles for more effective teaching and learning when coupled with smart thinking on curriculum, standards, assessments, and other core educational ingredients—especially when they are pursued collaboratively by superintendents, principals, teachers, and other key education leaders. Schools can and should embrace this dual role: combining their expertise in education with their willingness to try new approaches and make bold choices (and being unafraid to stand up to those who resist change to protect their own interests).

We also saw that schools can play an important role in community-wide innovations that go beyond education, such as with Community in Schools and the Los Angeles Urban League’s Neighborhoods@Work.

6)      What specific businesses or industries seem to be most amenable to this construct called “social innovation”?

We spoke with a number of for-profits that we would consider social innovators, whether because they also had a social mission, or worked through a philanthropic arm, or had a strong sense of corporate social responsibility. These companies crossed a wide spectrum of industries: real estate, management consulting, information technology, and even a bakery. Some use business acumen to provide a service themselves, some supply volunteers to nonprofit providers in an impactful way, and others still provide management expertise to help lead a cultural transformation within established organizations. In other words, any type of business or industry can help ignite change in our existing social problem solving systems. 

7)      What about urban versus rural areas- is the agenda for social change different in New York, than in New Mexico?

Much of our focus was on cities. But I would suggest that while there may be differences in scale, environment, and the specifics of each situation, the same general issues apply, regardless of region or population density. In particular, these are: improving educational preparedness, focusing on physical and mental health, increasing access to safe and affordable housing, addressing high unemployment, and increasing access to basic services like credit and fresh produce. For all of these, the approaches may vary to reflect each community’s specific circumstances, but the same basic principles and levers for change that I discussed above apply.

      What kind of criteria are you using to measure success?

It’s a great question that we are still working on. I assume you mean measuring the success of our own work promoting a social innovation agenda; the book is one part of a larger effort at Harvard (and one that is spreading from the White House to state houses and city halls across the country) to help communities increase the effectiveness of their shrinking social service dollars by increasing opportunities for effective social innovations to take hold and thrive. A few ideas we have include: increased awareness and understanding of social innovation (its definition as well as key issues, lessons learned, and strategies) among both civic leaders and entrepreneurs; the extent to which communities incorporate these lessons into their work finding innovative ways to solve complex public problems; the number of cities that create formal policies or structures to encourage social innovation and community engagement; and the quality of social innovations incubated or recruited into a community.

9)      What have I neglected to ask?

Where can readers, especially potential innovators, learn more? We are building an online presence to share the stories and lessons from the social innovators we have been working with. The best place to start is our website www.powerofsocialinnovation.com. And of course your readers might want to buy the book, which is available from Amazon and other booksellers.