Enabling Social Innovation: Concepts, frameworks & organisational change

Our Autumn Conference in Helsinki centred around what social innovation means for the disability support services sector.

Rationale of the conference

Does Social Innovation mean anything anymore? Or has it become an overused term to categorise any project with social ambitions?

Our Conference in Helsinki on 12-13 October 2023 centered around these questions.

Social Innovation seems to encompass everything and, in doing so, ends up covering nothing at all. The definition/meaning of Social Innovation has become so blurred and vague that social innovation in practice – and, in turn, the capacity of support services to implement the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities – has been hindered.

A common understanding of what Social Innovation entails across the disability sector is therefore necessary – a reboot of what the concept means to us now.

Support service providers need to have a clearer idea of what social innovation means in order to know:

how it applies to them,
how they can implement it,
what impact social innovation can have on the lives of persons with disabilities and their families,
the existing legal and financial frameworks that can help them innovate,
and how to create social innovation independently, e.g., by implementing new organisational change.

Through a variety of keynote speeches and interviews, workshops, panel discussions with innovative service providers, and networking opportunities, our conference in Helsinki aimed to provide clarity, solutions, and inspiration to these issues.