Social Innovation Lab Field Guide

Creativity Techniques
Written By Ben Weinlick
Quote: "In complexity there is no silver bullet only silver buckshot" by John Kania

We keep getting asked to email links to our latest social innovation lab field guide and thought it was long overdue to simply link it on the Think Jar Collective website. Our innovation field guide has been refined over the last 4 years and will continue with future iterations as new insights emerge. This latest version was tweaked with the help from my stellar colleague and close friend Aleeya Velji for the Mount Royal University and MacEwan University's Social Innovation Labs Course. Terms like Social Innovation, Design Thinking, Systems Thinking and many other buzzwords of disciplined innovation approaches are demystified in the guide.

"To aid the move from roundtable talks to action, a promising approach has been emerging in the social innovation ecosystem. Often called a social innovation lab, the approach draws on the strengths, empathy, creativity, and wisdom of a collective to explore new ways of making progress on a complex challenge. These labs are guided by convening diverse perspectives on an issue, gaining insight from people with lived experience of a challenge, facilitated ideation, building prototypes of solutions, and testing them to see how they work on the ground with people. A lab creates a safe zone for a collective to explore, question assumptions, be bold, be agile enough to adapt as learning emerges and experiment with solutions. As evidence emerges of what prototyped solutions are working, solutions can be scaled and spread to impact systemic change."

Labs are messy and so is this scrappy field guide

The guide is not as slick and well designed as some field guides, but it's packed with practical tips, tools, and learning that is our current best offer of what helps diverse collectives tackle complex social challenges through design and systems thinking methodologies. Even if you're working in the public or private sectors, you'll find tools and approaches that you can adapt to help tackle your own innovation and systemic challenges. 

Enjoy, remix, adapt and beware of using the process rigidly.
Ben Weinlick  

Download from the iBooks store for free 

iBooks Store Social Innovation Lab Field Guide Link

or

Free PDF download of Social Innovation Lab Field Guide

Examples of applying this field guide

Edmonton Shift Lab

Design By Doing Lab 

Infographic showing the difference between design labs, social innovation labs and social labs.

Infographic showing the difference between design labs, social innovation labs and social labs.

Ben Weinlick

Ben Weinlick is the founder of Think Jar Collective.

Currently Ben is also the Executive Director of Skills Society. Skills Society is one of largest and most innovative social service organizations in Canada. Stewarding an amazing collective of 500 employee, and a 25 million a year budget, Skills Society has a long and unique history related to social innovation and systems change around the rights and inclusion of people with intellectual disabilities. Ben and colleagues of Skills are known internationally for quality human centered services and creating tangible social innovations. Before becoming Executive Director in 2019, Ben stewarded Social Innovation Research & Development through an innovation lab he helped launch in 2015 called the Action Lab. The Action Lab focuses on systems change and innovation around some of the most wicked and entangled problems that humans are facing today. He is also the co-founder of MyCompass Planning which is on a mission to humanize social service case management systems where people served are centered in shaping their support services.

As the founder of Think Jar Collective and his expertise in disciplined innovation culture and methods, he regularly is asked by Universities, Businesses, Governments, and Non-Profits to help grow capacity to problem solve better and in more holistic ways. He offers keynotes on human centered service design thinking, social innovation labs and the tools and culture of disciplined innovation. Along the way striving to nudge positive systems change over the last 20+ years, he has had stellar mentors and colleagues that he shares credit with for accomplishments and awards.

He is deeply driven by the desire to help people, organizations and community to get better at navigating complex challenges together.

https://www.thinkjarcollective.com
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