Social Innovation

Social innovation and entrepreneurship are rising forces in the world. As stakeholder capitalism takes root, and as the extent of systemic challenges becomes clear - from climate change to income inequality to food security to health care and beyond - more and more of the best and brightest will hear the calling to become innovators and entrepreneurs who develop and deploy solutions to the world's thorniest problems.

What if I told you the public sector, so often derided as sluggish and stuffy, was full of innovators waiting to be unleashed? That we don’t need to invent a new solution to every problem, but to scale and spread all the proven innovation 90% of us don’t know about, or see? This book is about how to innovate in the public sector, what has been stopping us so far, and why we must do so. It draws on expert interviews, case studies, and frontline public service experience.

The story of human civilization can be read most deeply in the materials we have found or created, used or abused. They have dictated how we build, eat, communicate, wage war, create art, travel, and worship. Some, such as stone, iron, and bronze, lend their names to the ages. Others, such as gold, silver, and diamond, contributed to the rise and fall of great empires.

Early True Believers: The Untold Story of Silicon Alley is a 1990s saga of ambition and innovation set in Manhattan’s Silicon Alley, a swath of downtown that served as New York City’s nerve center of tech entrepreneurship. The series features the stories of a forgotten cohort of early internet visionaries, countercultural social networks, the digital gold rush, and the lavish events that came with it, including one held in an underground Tribeca bunker that abruptly ended in a police raid—a harbinger of the upheaval to come.

Social Innovation, Inc. declares a new era where companies profit from social change. Leading corporations like GE, Wellpoint, Travelers and Wal-Mart are transforming social responsibility into social innovation and revolutionizing the way we think about the role of business in society. Based on four years of measuring the social strategies of America's leading corporations, Jason Saul lays out the five strategies for social innovation and offers a practical roadmap for how to get started.

In conversation with social entrepreneur Badr Jafar, philanthropic leaders including Bill Gates, Baroness Valerie Amos, Kristalina Georgieva, David Miliband, Razan Al Mubarak and many more discuss their hopes and priorities for the world of today and tomorrow. Their insights shed new light on the increasingly important role that strategic philanthropy is playing in helping to address some of the world’s greatest challenges.

David Rowan travels the globe in search of the most exciting and pioneering start-ups building the future. He’s got to know the founders of WhatsApp, LinkedIn, Google, Spotify, Xiaomi, Didi, Nest, Twitter and countless other ambitious entrepreneurs disrupting businesses in almost every sector. And yet too often the companies they’re disrupting don’t get it. They think they can innovate through jargon: with talk of change agents and co-creation gurus, ideas portals and webinars, make-a-thons and hackfests, paradigm shifts and pilgrimages to Silicon Valley.

Understanding that the psychological well-being of individuals is inextricably linked to the health of their communities, environments, and cultures, the authors propose a radical interdisciplinary reorientation of psychology to create participatory and dialogical spaces for critical understanding and creative restoration.

In The Politics Industry, Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter ingeniously apply the tools of business analysis - and Porter's distinctive Five Forces framework - to show how the political system functions just as every other competitive industry does, and how the duopoly has led to the devastating outcomes we see today. Using this competition lens, Gehl and Porter identify the most powerful lever for change - a strategy comprised of a clear set of choices in two key areas: how our elections work and how we make our laws.

In an irresistible invitation to lighten up, look around, and live an unscripted life, a Stanford University professor and master of the art of improvisation explains how to adopt the attitudes and techniques used by generations of musicians and actors. These secrets are currently being taught to entrepreneurs, engineers, and first responders in a crisis as well as housewives and Alzheimer caregivers. Let's face it: Life is something we all make up as we go along.

You're not just a business leader or an aspiring entrepreneur; you are a changemaker with the potential to drive significant impact. However, navigating the intricate paths of social entrepreneurship can feel daunting without a comprehensive roadmap. Inside this handbook, you'll uncover a step-by-step guide to transforming your innovative ideas into successful ventures while making a positive impact.

This book by military strategist Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., is the definitive take on the race for military dominance in the twenty-first century. It shows how militaries that successfully pursue disruptive innovation can gain a major advantage over their rivals, while those that fail to do so risk exposing their countries to great danger.

Much of the world's landmass is already known. Deep sea and outer space are beyond most people's reach. It feels like there are fewer places left to discover. Psychedelics, on the other hand, reveal worlds that remain largely obscure. Altered states offer modern, 21st-century audiences boundless opportunities to explore what a human being can experience. In this book, I show you how to become a capable discovery-maker, sample-collecting naturalist, and rational thinker of visionary phenomena.

Governments worldwide struggle to remove policy deadlocks and enact much-needed reforms in organizational structure and public services. This book explores collaborative innovation as a way for public and private stakeholders to break the impasse. Torfing draws on his own pioneering work in Europe as well as examples from the UnS and Australia to construct a cross-disciplinary framework for studying collaborative innovation.

Over the last decade, Azeem Azhar - writer, technologist and creator of the Exponential View platform - has become our leading thinker on how technology is transforming business, politics and society. Now, Azhar offers a holistic way to think about the effects of new tech. Our society, Azhar argues, is afflicted by an 'exponential gap' - the gulf between the growing pace of technological change, and our institutions' struggle to keep up.

Space entrepreneur turned innovation pioneer Peter H. Diamandis and award-winning science writer Steven Kotler document how progress in artificial intelligence, robotics, digital manufacturing synthetic biology, and other exponentially growing technologies will enable us to make greater gains in the next two decades than we have in the previous 200 years.

The old tools of political analysis are obsolete - they have rusted and are no longer fit for purpose. We've grown lazy, wedded to the assumption that, after ruptures such as Brexit, the pandemic and the rise of the populist Right, things will eventually go 'back to normal'. Award-winning political writer Matthew d'Ancona invites you to think afresh: to seek new ways of challenging political extremism, bombastic populism and democratic torpor on both Left and Right. In this groundbreaking book, he proposes a new way of understanding our era and plots a way forward.

Drawing from an incredibly rich trove of global data, this groundbreaking book reveals that human progress has been slowing down since the early 1970s. Danny Dorling uses compelling visualizations to illustrate how fertility rates, growth in GDP per person, increases in life expectancy, and even the frequency of new social movements have all steadily declined over the last few generations.

Every so often, a new idea comes along that changes everything. Vaccinations. Relativity. Fascism. Can we imagine a world before the invention of writing? hat would Christianity have looked like without with a concept of hell? This fascinating little audiobook tells the stories behind 150 revolutionary concepts and explains why they are important. Taken from the realms of science, politics, society, religion and technology, these are the big ideas that have changed the world - in a nutshell.

Sometimes the events that seem pivotal are just blips, while the more meaningful cultural shifts are hiding in plain sight. Marian Salzman’s job is to uncover those hidden shifts. So what’s in store for the next two decades? In this acutely observed guide, Salzman, whose past predictions have been heralded for coming uncannily close to the way we live now, unpacks the course of human life from the bumpy turn of the millennium through the pandemic era.