Social Innovation or Managerial Chic?

Some observers with a genuine interest in social innovation will be alarmed by the ease with which the social innovation agenda has been gobbled up by the larger, and always predatory, field of public sector innovation. Others with wiser heads will perhaps not be surprised. In any case, we can say that in Australia at least, in but a handfull of years, the former has arguably disappeared without trace. Christian Bason's November tour, billed as one of a series of Social Innovation Dialogues, has signalled the deathknell for social innovation in this country.

Bason's sessions were knowingly titled Co-creating for social impact: how can co-creation drive public sector innovation? If social innovation purports to locate the drivers for change in a social kaleidoscope of collaborating individuals and agencies, and wrestles with the challenge of maintaining social autonomy for these collaborations, then public sector innovation locates the driver for change in one, clearly marked top drawer - public sector management. So much simpler, so much easier than social innovation - one place where folks work from 9 to 5 and can be trusted to be at their desks. The challenge for social innovation in Australia was always going to be to get political and public sector support for the concept that there is a society out there, and that it might do things by itself.

But as Noel Pearson has conceded recently, this was a big ask and it fatally underestimated the extent to which the state, in a country established as a penal colony, still calls the shots over civil society. And so, Bason in a series of Social Innovation Dialogues, tells us how co-creation might serve, not society, nor social innovation, but public sector innovation. In Australia, the public sector is God, and society His Little Helpers. It has been so since 1788. We might think society and its segments (families, communities, neighbourhoods, voluntary associations, messy relationships of all kinds) are the stuff of co-creation, but Bason assures us this is not so by excluding any reference to society or its associations from his scope. Reassuringly for Australians, he tells us that co-creation, if done right, and with courage, can serve the public sector.

When a straight-faced presenter tells us, in a series of Social Innovation Dialogues that are jointly auspiced by three organisations nominally committed to social innovation, that innovation and co-creation can serve the public sector, we know the game is well and truly up.

Vern Hughes