Everyone wants to get better outcomes for people and places from whatever given level of funding and other resources is available.  The level of funding itself is something we can argue about, of course.  Getting a greater rate of social return on investment, however, is an objective shared across the political divide; between those involved in providing services and the users of them?  Social innovation is the process by which we collectively can increase the social profitability of public services. 

So the question isn’t whether successful social innovation is desirable, but why there is so little of it and whether we can find ways of overcoming what gets in the way of it?  Social Innovation Zones (SIZes) are an idea, made in Birmingham, that has come out of attempts to answer these questions.   (The idea came from Chamberlain Forum at a discussion at Birmingham University organised by the City Council and was refined at a community conversation organised as part of the SU4B – Stepping Up for Birmingham – campaign).  

No one SIZe for All

A SIZe is a publicly declared area within which the council, the local community, their leaders and other partners declare their shared intention to improve the social profit of a service or set of public service outcomes.  It is time-limited: there is a target date at which the SIZe is either reviewed or dissolved.  There are boundaries (though these may be ‘fuzzy’).  There is agreement about the desirability and opportunity for improvement and the outcomes that will be improved.  There is a publicly advertised willingness on the part of those involved to change, suspend, amend or revise policies, practices and the way their assets, human resources and information are used and managed within the area.

Specifying a locality and an area of likely innovation for a SIZe is useful, but it needn’t be set in stone. The boundaries – in terms of geography and subject area – are likely to be ‘fuzzy’. Neighbouring groups and initiatives can still be involved even if they are just outside the area.  There is no particular geographical size for a SIZe – it could cover a singel tower block or cul-de-sac, a neighbourhood or a high street, or a whole district.  There is no limit on the services or outcomes that could be included in a SIZe – so long as local partners agree that it is feasible to cover the agreed set of outcomes.  There is, in short, no one SIZe to fit all – the zones are the product of the locality to which they relate.

Accountability, Focus and Organisational ‘Edginess’

The idea of declaring an area is two-fold:

• to help local leaders including councillors to explain and account for variations in services and to limit the likely extent of such variations so that residents inside and around the SIZe area can understand and feel comfortable with any variations
• to encourage and coordinate the focus of local partners within a defined area to enable social innovation by, for example, varying the way they work to enable a partner to work differently – without having to change the entire system by which they work. 

Having declared an SIZe and defined a service area in which social innovation is most likely to be sought within it, the idea is that interested residents and relevant groups and agencies can meet to focus information about budgets, assets, objectives and plans (2 Stars grading). Local leaders can us the SIZe as a way of explaining and accounting for innovation and the differences in service delivery, resourcing, staffing and other variables which it might entail. External bodies – including providers of funding and expertise – can use SIZes to better engage their efforts in fostering and supporting social innovation and learning from it. In this way a SIZe could support the achievement of high grade social innovation.

By tackling both accountability and focus – enabling changes in localities – SIZes help partner organisations to be more ‘edgy’ – that is, able to make changes driven by their edges (the places they come into contact with service users, communities and other partners) rather than relying on strategies sanctioned from their organisational centres.

Where do you know where you think it might be useful to declare a Social Innovation Zone – so as to provide an accountable focus for trying different ways of delivering local services to do with a particular set of outcomes?

 How else could your organisation be more ‘edgy’