"ahead of the evidence and in front of the science" How do you measure social innovation?
Innovation is being sought in many fields to create new approaches and to move ideas from incubation into operation. The expanding fields of social innovation and entrepreneurship have inspired new approaches for agencies to work together to develop fresh ways of meeting pressing social and health needs.
Across the world philanthropic trusts and foundations have engaged with social entrepreneurs and communities to fund effective and practical solutions in diverse fields such and health, education, housing, financing, social justice. Funders from the public, private and philanthropic sectors in New Zealand are increasingly being drawn to invest in innovative projects, however the methods of evaluation of these projects or measuring the return on their investment are limited.
Traditional methods of programme evaluation or measure are usually independent and regimes that rely on consistency, repetition and often separation, there is often a reliance on numerical and financial data. When assessing the impact or success of innovative projects this is often inadequate as the dynamics, the systems, the learning, the interconnections and understanding of the parts of the environment or emerging impacts are not reflected.
Developmental Evaluation
 | This emerging area of innovation has also given rise to a new way of thinking about measurement and evaluation that is intended to serve and sustain innovation. Patton (2006), is a leading thinker in the area of evaluation of complex and innovative projects and has described what he is calling developmental evaluation. |
Developmental evaluation is in itself is a developing concept, an evaluation that takes place in situations where goals and outcomes are not pre-set but rather evolve as learning occurs. Patton notes social innovators are "likely to be ahead of the evidence and in front of the science".
Developmental evaluation integrates creativity and critical thinking, involving long term partnering relationships between the evaluators and the innovators. It is designed to nurture developmental, emergent, innovative and transformative processes.
In Canada the McConnell Foundation have begun an exploration of the use of developmental evaluation with a number of agencies who are running test and pilots (Gamble 2007).
Other Links
Social Innovation: What It Is, Why It Matters and How It can be Accelerated by Geoff Mulgan with Simon Tucker, Rushanara Ali and Ben Sanders (Skoll Centre Oxford Said Business School 2007).
In and out of sync: The challenge of growing social innovations (Sept 2007)
This report is about how social innovations spread and grow. It aims to provide a theoretically and empirically grounded guide for the many people involved in social innovation: innovators, funders, policy-makers and commissioners. It draws on a growing body of research on patterns of growth, and distils its conclusions into a guide to help direct scarce resources more effectively to maximise social impact.
