This project begins with a recognition that we live and work in a rapidly changing world, and with these changes we face an ever-expanding array of social issues. The priorities of the social issues we face change with our local and regional contexts, and so it makes sense to look to local resources when designing policies and mechanisms to achieve positive social impact. In addition, it makes sense to look at areas of current investment made by local and regional governments and assess how these expenditures might also stimulate positive social impact.
A common area of significant investment made by local and regional governments is in innovation support to Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SMEs). This innovation investment typically aims to assist SMEs in achieving growth in order to increase employment and local standards of living. Indeed, it is in the provision of employment that many SMEs recognise as their main social contribution. However, many innovation support programmes do more than simply provide monetary investment for research and development; many innovation programmes have an ambition to upskill SMEs’ innovative capacity, to enable them to address new problems in new ways, and to move beyond their current markets through the provision of new to company or new to market products and services. Where this ambition is successful, the result is a local community with new skills, and the potential to apply these skills to local social issues. Therefore, this project has raised important questions on how do we use what SMEs have learned, and how, in future, do we orchestrate innovation support to SMEs to develop positive social impact? And further, how do we build in the requisite ongoing relationships to understand SMEs social contribution post innovation support?
In order to begin to address these key questions, this project has built on the success of Design Thinking as a process to bring stakeholders together to develop solutions to complex and wicked problems. In this case SMEs and Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) worked together on the Super CitizenS(ME) Lab project to propose potential and viable social impact projects that could be delivered in collaboration between the parties. These workshops demonstrate that the innovative capability within SMEs can be redirected towards positive social impact, and that Design Thinking activities present a useful approach in stimulating the required activity. This is an important first step in harnessing SME innovative capability for social impact and provides an opportunity for innovation policy that benefits SMEs, CSO and governmental social impact ambitions. With the knowledge that there is potential for SMEs to contribute to social impact, a remaining question from an innovation policy perspective is how to motivate such SME social participation? With the pilot action, potential SME motivations included raising their CSR profile, the acquisition of new skills, the extension of their network by cooperating with CSOs and the promotion of their work to new audiences. These drivers can be built upon by governments through the requirements to demonstrate social impact as a condition of innovation funding. Such requirements additionally have the potential to be beneficial to SME competitiveness, as it stimulates an ability to better articulate social impact, which can in turn lead to improved performance in contract tendering in competition with larger organisations that are well-versed in presenting such social agendas.
