Playing with the rules of the game: transformative social innovation

Dr Matthew Thompson

Heseltine Institute for Public Policy and Practice

University of Liverpool

matthew.thompson@liverpool.ac.uk

Local Enterprise Partnership (LEP)’s

‘Growth Strategy’

Focused on 7 ‘Growth sectors’:

1. Advanced manufacturing

2. Digital and creative

3. Financial and professional services

4. Health and life sciences

5. Low carbon energy

6. Maritime and logistics

7. Visitor economy

• High GVA (‘gross value added’) and productivity generating

• But low employment generation or deprivation problem solving

The problem of Liverpool • 70% of the core is within

England’s worst 10% of deprived areas, and much of the inner city and outer estates count among the worst 1%!

• Healthy-life expectancy varies by 30 years between wealthy suburbs and pockets of persistent poverty.

• Liverpool City Region LEP area is worst performing of 39 in England in 2015 Indices of Multiple Deprivation

LEP Innovation Plan 2014 - 2020

“In seeking to address the structural challenges in the City Region, innovation plays a key role in realising wider economic potential. In sophisticated market economies, innovation is increasingly the key to success. As places become more alike they have to compete on content and value rather than price alone.

Innovation helps provide the new, fresh thinking, products and services with which our businesses, people and place need to meet the challenge of relentlessly increasing competition. Innovation also helps us to develop solutions to the so-called Grand Societal Challenges of population growth, climate change and resource availability.”

(Liverpool City Region LEP 2014: 3-4; my bold)

LEP Innovation Plan 2014 - 2020

“seeks to harness and exploit the LCR’s exceptional array of distinctive science and innovation assets, ranging from Unilever’s global R&D HQ and the Virtual Engineering Centre, to the planet’s biggest offshore wind farm and EU’s largest supply of chlor-alkali hydrogen, to the STFC Hartree Centre supercomputer and IBM Watson platform, to the internationally renowned School of Tropical Medicine and new Alder Hey with its vision to be the world’s first “living hospital”.”

Re-appropriating innovation

• Social innovation re-appropriates the notions of invention, innovation, creativity and problem-solving for progressive social ends other than the linear path to technological progress, organisational efficiency and private profit…

• …for people and places, rooted in specific contexts, rather than products and things, free-floating in global markets.

• Mirroring recent efforts to re-imagine the discourse of enterprise and entrepreneurialism for collective action and radical self-organisation

• that challenge the neoliberal narrative of the heroic individualistic entrepreneur

• and relocate enterprise in political activism, mutual aid and co-operativism (Southern 2014)

What is social innovation?

1. social entrepreneurialism research: focusing in on the micro, individual scale – the social entrepreneur and their actions and behaviour

2. social enterprise: on the scale of the organisation

3. social innovation: the scale of institutions and systems; specifically processes of systemic and institutional change (Chalmers, 2012).

• All about re-appropriating for more social ends concepts ordinarily associated with capitalism, technology, organisational efficiency and profit

The 6th Kondratiev wave? • Grand claims are made about the disruptive potential of social

innovation – framed as a ‘sixth wave’ of transformational macro-level change, following the familiar technological Kondratiev waves (Nicholls & Murdock, 2012):

1. industrial revolution (1771-1829)

2. the age of steam and rail (1830-1875)

3. steel, electricity and engineering (1876-1908)

4. oil, automobile and mass production (1909-1979)

5. information and telecommunications (1971-)

6. Social innovation ???

• ‘Postmodern standstill’, ‘post-political condition’, ‘end of history’, ‘zombie neoliberalism’ narratives – lack of expected structural change

• Shift to ‘post-capitalism’ claimed to be through new peer-to-peer digital technologies, collaboration and social innovation (Paul Mason, 2015)

…Post-neoliberalism?

• signs we’re on the cusp of another seismic socioeconomic shift…

• proliferation of concepts and prefixes to describe what many see as a ‘new economy’ – ‘social’, ‘solidarity’, ‘collaborative’, ‘sharing’, ‘community’ economies (Avelino et al., 2015).

• Social innovation as the facilitator of the shift – as the necessary social counterpart to technological change – to translate tech innovation as transformation in social relations/ institutional configurations

Historical origins

• first coined in early nineteenth century France as a derogatory label criticising the naivety of early utopian-socialist experiments, for ignoring the structural constraints of capitalist dynamics, envisioned by the likes of Fourier, Saint-Simon and Robert Owen

• French debate on social innovation re-emerged in the wake of the radical events of May 1968 by social researchers rediscovering the role of everyday life and small-scale solutions in social change. (Chambon et al. 1982)

Historical origins: May ‘68, Paris

“Entrepreneurs are people who can imagine the world differently” (Anita Roddick, founder of Body Shop)

Pre-paradigmatic field

• by 2000s, social innovation increasingly bound up with entrepreneurialism

• embraced by various governments, agencies and associated think tanks for public sector reform and policy panacea to global problems

• Young Foundation and NESTA’s championing entrepreneurial and business-minded conception in UK;

• Obama’s Social Innovation Fund and Office of Social Innovation within the White House;

• incorporation into policymaking in Quebec, Latin America and especially the EU.

• All competing to define the paradigm structuring the field…

EU funded projects…

• SINGOCOM (Social Innovation GOvernance and COMmunity building), 2001-2006, producing…

• ALMOLIN (Alternative MOdel of Local Innovation) which sought to provide answers to the question: Can neighbourhoods save the city? (Moulaert et al., 2010).

• TRANSIT (TRANsformative Social Innovation Theory) 2014-2017, 12 partners across Europe and Latin America

… All quite radical conceptions of transformative social innovation (TSI)

TSI movements identified by TRANSIT

1. ‘degrowth and localisation’, focusing on ecological justice, low carbon transitions, circular economies, such as eco villages and transition towns;

2. ‘social entrepreneurship and the social economy’, focusing on connecting and incubating social enterprises through co-working spaces, innovation labs, impact hubs, accelerators;

3. ‘collaborative economy’ of sharing and redesigning goods through decentralised networks, digital fabrication, open source and peer-to-peer technologies and hackerspaces and makerspaces;

4. ‘solidarity economy’, aiming for participatory democracy and political institutional change, including movements for a universal basic income, the right to the city, participatory budgeting, collective governance of assets through community land trusts etc.

Minimalist vs Maximalist

1. SI: “changes in social relations involving new ways of doing, organising, knowing and framing”

2. Transformative SI: “contributes to transformative societal change, for example towards new economic systems” (Avelino et al., 2015: 2).

• Unger’s (2015: 236) ‘minimalist’ and ‘maximalist’ definitions:

1) confined to the ‘third sector’;

2) aiming for change encompassing “the whole of society, of its institutional arrangements, and of its dominant form of consciousness.”

• Martinez’s (2016: 224) two forms of struggle:

1) “the struggle to succeed according to the values of a particular game”

2) “the struggle to decide which game is being played.”

Playing a game…?

• TRANSIT literature characterises SI as like “multi-player games” played by various actors and “stabilized and channelled by institutions, the rules of the game” (Pel & Bauler, 2014: 2)

1. social innovation within niches, such as particular neighbourhoods;

2. system innovation within regime sub-systems, such as healthcare or housing;

3. ‘game changers’ – “macro-developments that are perceived to drastically alter the rules, the fields and the players in the ‘game’ of governance interactions” (Pel & Bauler, 2014: 7).

The rules of the game

• ‘the rules of the game’ that define a particular institutional field (Lowndes, 2005)

Or

“…a kind of arena in which people play a game which has certain rules, rules which are different from those of the game that is played in the adjacent space” (Bourdieu, 1991: 215).

Play vs. Games

“True, one can play a game; but to speak of “play” does not necessarily imply the existence of rules at all. Play can be purely improvisational. One could simply be playing around. In this sense, play in its pure form, as distinct from games, implies a pure expression of creative energy...

[P]lay can be said to be present when the free expression of creative energies becomes an end in itself. It is freedom for its own sake. But this also makes play in a certain sense a higher-level concept than games: play can create games, it can generate rules—in fact, it inevitably does produce at least tacit ones, since sheer random playing around soon becomes boring—but therefore by definition play cannot itself be intrinsically rule-bound.”

(Graeber, 2015: 191-192)

Play vs. games

“In fact, if it were possible to come up with a workable definition of “play” (this is notoriously difficult) it would have to be something along these lines: play can be said to be present when the free expression of creative energies becomes an end in itself. It is freedom for its own sake.

But this also makes play in a certain sense a higher-level concept than games: play can create games, it can generate rules—in fact, it inevitably does produce at least tacit ones, since sheer random playing around soon becomes boring— but therefore by definition play cannot itself be intrinsically rule-bound.”

(Graeber, 2015, 191-192)

Play vs. games

“We play games. So does that mean play and games are really the same thing? It’s certainly true that the English language is somewhat unusual for even making the distinction between the two… But on another level they seem to be opposites, as one suggests free-form creativity; the other, rules.” (190)

Indian philosopher of science Shiv Visvanathan:

“A game is a bounded, specific way of problem solving. Play is more cosmic and open-ended… A game has a predictable resolution, play may not. Play allows for emergence, novelty, surprise.”

How play drives social innovation

“Through its playing with limits, experimentation with rules, roles and meanings, and mimetic behaviour, playing contains transformative potential. It is an area ripe for rupture, sparks of insight and moments of invention, which presents us with ways to be ‘otherwise’” (Woodyer, 2012)

“to speak of ‘play’ does not necessarily imply the existence of rules at all. Play can be purely improvisational. One could simply be playing around. In this sense, play in its pure form, as distinct from games, implies a pure expression of creative energy” (Graeber, 2015: 191)

The covert appeal of bureaucracy

• “On the one hand, a bureaucracy is anything but playful. Mechanistic and impersonal, it would appear to represent the negation of any possibility of playfulness. On the other hand, being trapped in a bureaucratic runaround feels very much like being caught inside some kind of horrific game.” (109)

• “Bureaucracies create games – they’re just games that are in no way fun”

• “[w]hat ultimately lies behind the appeal of bureaucracy is fear of play.” (110).

• “But there is also something potentially terrifying about play… Because this open-ended creativity is also what allows it to be randomly destructive. Cats play with mice. Pulling the wings off flies is also a form of play. Playful gods are rarely ones any sane person would desire to encounter”

• “For the social theorist, there is one obvious analogy to play as a principle that generates rules, but is not itself bound by them. This is the principle of sovereignty.”

• “Games, then, are a kind of utopia of rules”

Innovation (play) vs. bureaucracy (rules)

Working within set boundaries and in accordance with strictly prescribed procedures – the domain of state bureaucracy – is wholly anathema to the concept of innovation, which by its very essence attempts to twist and reconfigure those rules or boundaries to create something new, not previously possible within the coordinates set by them.

For something new to emerge, for active creation to occur, rules must be broken, or at least bent out of shape a little. And in this lies the profound antipathy between innovation and bureaucracy – as a rule-based game.

Tensions within play-game dialectic

Play Games

Creativity Problem-solving

End in itself Means to an end

spontaneity instrumentality

spiritual rational

Rule-generating Rule-bound

Autonomy / sovereignty Bureaucracy / institutions

Creativity is fundamentally dependent on constraints; imaginative innovation is impossible without at least some boundary-making (Stokes, 2006)

Social innovation aims at solving a problem in a particular institutional context

(i.e. rules of the game) through creative new ideas…

Liverpool Waters Enterprise Zone

Ronnie Hughes, www.asenseofplace.com

• “The Beautiful North” project designed to change perceptions of North Liverpool.

• Anfield Comprehensive was demolished and turned it into a car park for people going to Anfield to watch Liverpool FC.

• On match days, the car park generates considerable revenue that is then reinvested back into the local economy by Beautiful Ideas Co.

• The money is matched by £375,000 from central government’s Public Sector Launchpad Accelerator

• Beautiful Ideas Co.’s Launchpad ran ideas competition inviting local people to imagine new forms of economic development that must be applied collaboratively for social impact in North Liverpool

• Launchpad to fund 10-15 project ideas ranging from £300 - £30,000.

• 70 applications by Jan 2016 closing date – Launchpad team since worked with applicants to develop ideas into investable projects

• Created or supported 100 new jobs in just 6 months – only £7,500 investment per new job

1. spaces for change;

2. making use of under-utilised assets (e.g. empty homes/shops);

3. mobilising the local workforce and tackling under/unemployment;

4. reinvigorating production/the maker movement through the local skill-base;

5. harnessing social networks to address social exclusion;

6. stimulating local spend and circulation of money through radical banking.

• A Community Interest Company (CIC) ‘makerspace’ in old industrial unit in north docks

• First recipient of Lauchpad with £30,000 to renovate building into…

• Hub and co-working space for anyone to use shared tools and equipment (artists, builders, carpenters, designers, photographers etc.)

• Building on local traditions of craft and manufacturing

• Part of innovation towards a ‘maker’ economy

Make Liverpool CIC

Patient capital investment

• Loans are very low interest and only repayable if enterprise is successful

• 10 year period with a 3 year repayment holiday

• Repayments start only once enterprises are profitable

• Loan written off if enterprise proves unsuccessful for whatever reason

• Loans can also be repaid in social value rather than financial return

Revenue participation agreement:

• If successful, Beautiful Ideas Co. will receive 1% of total revenues

• But this is capped at £10,000 return, due to possibility of making huge returns, disproportionate to original investment

• Recouping costs is unnecessary as car park revenue provides income for fund

• Loan agreements meant to inspire a business mentality rather than grant culture

Reinventing capitalism…?

• “the model breeds success through handshakes, not handouts.”

• collaboration, cooperation, trust and an “infectious energy” circulates outwards into communities – “like a handshake passing on.”

• returning to the Latin root of ‘credit’: ‘credo’, meaning ‘to believe in and trust’

low interest loans written off through a simple method of observation and trust in their beneficiaries. One of their beneficiaries, Airborn Academy, an urban free-running facility and coaching centre has had its repayments on its £10,000 loan completely cleared through demonstration of social value:

- between 900 and 1500 young people using the facility each week;

- employing 38 staff.