CERGAS SEMINAR "From Disruption to Diffusion: Activating the Process of Social Innovation"

Policymakers, practitioners, and academics who focus on social change have long recognized the pressing need for new strategies to foster social change and to adequately combat the wicked social problems (Rittel and Webber, 1973) facing the world today. From rising social inequality to pressing environmental issues, societies are struggling to address the complex, intractable issues that reflect our times, and which pose significant threats to our individual and collective welfare. Social innovation offers a way forward to catalyze social change.

This book is not focused on understanding the emergence of social innovation as a field, which has been explicated by a number of recent books (Logue, 2019; Baglioni and Sinclair, 2018; Mulgan, 2019). Instead, this book address this critical gap in our understanding of social innovation processes by advancing a clear framework through which to understand how to make social innovation possible. This book will describe how innovation modalities can be applied to address social problems and what metrics and methods ought to be used to generate insights at all stages of the social innovation process (co-production, piloting, scaling, and diffusion).

The book concludes by discussing issues of entrenched power, funding, and evaluation that need to be addressed in order for social innovation to shift systems.

Speaker: Gary Painter, SOL Price center for social innovation, USC Los Angeles.

Gary Painter is a Professor in the Sol Price School of Public Policy at the University of Southern California. He also serves as the Director of the Sol Price Center for Social Innovation and the Homelessness Policy Research Institute. He recently published a co-authored book entitled, “Payment by Results and Social Impact Bonds: Outcome-based Payment Systems in the UK and US.” He has published numerous articles in top journals such as the Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Urban Economics, Urban Studies, Journal of Human Resources, Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, Real Estate Economics, Journal of Real Estate Finance and Economics, and Regional Science and Urban Economics.

Professor Painter is a leading figure in the field of social innovation. In addition to his recent book, he works extensively with a variety of social innovation organizations and collective impact networks to address some of the grand challenges that society faces. His current research focuses on how to activate the social innovation process. Professor Painter also has extensive expertise in housing, urban economics, and education policy, which shapes his research on how the social innovation process can identify new models of social change within these complex policy areas.

Link zoom: https://unibocconi-it.zoom.us/j/98797808986?pwd=TzZia1dDY2ZBb1dXNVcxL05oTDFrdz09

For those willing to participate in person, please write to erica.dugnani@sdabocconi.it before Thursday, September 29th.