Disruptive Innovation for Social Change

I read an article from Harvard Business Review and by Christensen, Baumann, Ruggles and Sadtler. It was interesting look at the concept of Innovation for Social Change. The paper defined the Catalytic Innovations as innovations that;

• create systemic social change through scaling
• serve a need which is either over-served (with too much complesx solutions) or underserved
• offer services or products that are simplier, less costly but good enough
• generate resources different ways than market competitors (such as donations, grants, volunteer man-power...)
• are being often ignored or sometimes encouraged by existing players for whom the business model is unprofitable

The key take-away for me the suggestion that tax classification -for profit versus nonprofit- is not a useful criteria for identifying catalytic innovators. That's new way of thinking for social change agents; for profit organisations might be a big contributor to social change. John Elkington and Pamela Hartigan's last book "The Power of Unreasonable People" suggests similar and describes 3 different types of Social Business

• Leveraged nonprofit ventures
• Mixed nonprofit ventures
• Social business ventures

I am still reading the book when I finish it, I will make a comprehensive entry about it

Social innovation: Good for you, good for me

Check this article of Ethicalcorp: http://www.ethicalcorp.com/content.asp?contentid=5823
I liked the article, Social innovation has great potential and people are beginning to realise that.