Centre for Social Innovation - Where Change Happens!

The Centre for Social Innovation is a proud member of the Social Innovation Exchange (SIX), a global network of organizations and institutions dedicated to - wait for it - social innovation.  SIX was started by, and is based out of, the Young Foundation in London, UK, of which we are big fans. 

Every couple of months, SIX members are invited to participate in a TelePresence session, facilitated by Cisco's cutting edge and astonishingly impressive video conference technology. For the fall session, CSI was invited to host a conversation on the topic of City Innovation. This is a topic of deep interest to us, and we wanted to host a session that was engaging both in terms of content and in terms of process - i.e., taking advantage of the technology. We ended up with this proposal (pdf) - a great short read on how we approached the topic.

In short, our approach was based on a sudden insight: What if we took our Theory of Change and applied it at the city-level? Our Theory of Change is rendered as a pyramid: the bottom layer is space, the middle layer is community, and the top layer is innovation. Applied to CSI, the theory argues that by paying attention to the design of our space, and by working to animate our community, we create the conditions for social innovtaion emergence. We wondered if this would work at the city-level. Can we understand our city's capacity to innovate as an output of urban design and community connectivity?

The conversation included participants from London, New York, Singapore, Sydney and Copenhagen. Each participant shared two pictures: one showing a feature of their city that fosters social innovation, and one showing a feature of their city that hinders social innovation.  The pictures ranged from samples of good/bad urban design to psycho-social environments and events that build or break-down community relations.

The conversation was fascinating. Our next steps are to carry forward the conversation on a global and local level. Globally, the SIX partners will build on the first conversation by adding notes and pictures. In a month or so, we'll revisit the content and explore how to move forward: through research, report development, local experiments, or...? We're also keen to explore what this means for Toronto. How can Toronto better foster social innovation? What features of our urban design and our community facilitate innovation? More importantly, how can we work with - and improve - what we already have to generate new social innovations.

The conversation is just beginning...stay tuned for more...