Social Will Dominate Future Innovation

Social will be everywhere.
This is part of IEEE Spectrum's prognosis: Top 11 Technologies of the Decade

Social Economy - we are seeing the mechanisms of the social economy breaking down and the different institutions and organizations are going to be under even more severe pressure with cost cuts. Often the boundaries there were clear in the past are becoming blurred and we have to tackle these with more social innovations. There is an increasing need to redraw a growing complex set of relationships and establish the different, distinct approaches required by innovation to understand, leverage and extract more from these groups involved for more social needs and aspirations of individuals within communities.
Social transformations are happening all around us. The very structures and institutions are under increasing strain and in some cases simply collapsing. There are new paradigms that we need to understand and translate, for instance the massive shift taking place from ‘push-through’ to ‘pull-through’ and the requirement of the individual not just serving the mass. There is intense ‘tensions’ for wider change and many organizations are failing to keep up or not being bold or radical enough to embrace and innovate in these changing times
Social innovation is growing in its discipline, its identity and understanding its tasks. Social innovation has to tackle the problems of increasing epidemics, flooding, pollution, healthcare costs, waste, inadequate welfare programs and a widening inequality within society. We have to construct solutions around 1) structures and mechanisms to develop and diffuse quickly and effectively, 2) establish the process of social innovation to extend it beyond business or its philanthropy roots to extend it and spread it and in so doing bypass many restrictions and current barriers left in place from a rapidly older order of society and 3) productive systems to learn who can do what, when, where, how and with whom and scale it accordingly.
Social Entrepreneurship - presently there are prescriptive theories on this as it is only emerging as a discipline in its own right in recent years and research tends to lag. What goes on today is social entrepreneurs blend methods from business and philanthropy to deliver what is needed in their challenge. This needs more understanding to allow for greater ‘replication’. The need of the social entrepreneur is to create social value but we need to define this a little more in the coming period.
Social value chains really do need to have an increased focus to understand in design, scale, the critical value-adding points, the ability or inability to scale understanding and in the service criteria. Some years ago the value chain become a focus of business with the result seeing a dramatic productivity improvement in results and we need the same amount of dedicated focus on the social value chain and what are good and improved outcomes along it from these efforts.
Social Enterprises - The need to organize and deliver in complex situations of crisis requires very different thinking and adaption than in the norm.