Course subject: Social Innovation (SOCIN)

This course covers the history of design thinking as a tool for supporting system change at local and broad scales - from designers like Bruce Mau, who uses this approach to describe what he calls "massive change", to complexity thinkers like Brian Arthur who explores the nature of technological innovation. The course also investigates the methodological implications of design thinking approaches to strategy development and implementation.

This course explores different approaches that can be used to bring social innovations to scale so that they can have a broad, durable impact on a system. The role of social entrepreneurs and institutional entrepreneurs will be introduced and explored as being key to catalyzing changes in resource flows, the understanding of problems and in shifting laws and policies that govern the problem domain. New approaches to generating financing and revenue for social good, the governance and partnership structures these imply, and how they can enable or constrain systems change. Examples will be drawn from Canadian and international contexts form the perspectives of entrepreneurs, investors/donors, policymakers and beneficiaries