{"id":5183,"date":"2014-03-30T19:04:46","date_gmt":"2014-03-30T19:04:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=5183"},"modified":"2014-03-30T19:04:46","modified_gmt":"2014-03-30T19:04:46","slug":"social-innovation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=5183","title":{"rendered":"Social Innovation"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Last month the Province of Alberta proposed to create a <a href=\"http:\/\/humanservices.alberta.ca\/social-innovation-fund.html\">Social Innovation Endowment<\/a> to &#8220;help foster new, solution-oriented approaches to solving Alberta&#8217;s complex social challenges&#8230;&#8221;. The endowment fund will be $1 billion which should generate eventually $45 million a year towards research, knowledge dissemination and prototype partnerships.<\/p>\n<p>As a <a href=\"http:\/\/alberta.ca\/release.cfm?xID=359728D5EF19F-D565-C959-7EFD9867C9BC38F7\">government announcement from March 4th<\/a> puts it, &#8220;Bill 1 creates the largest social innovation endowment in Canada&#8230;&#8221; This Social Innovation fund is not the first fund to support research. We have funds supporting medical research and scientific research: the Alberta Heritage Science and Engineering Research Endowment Fund (AHSER) and the Alberta Heritage Foundation for Medical Research Endowment Fund (AHFMR) and there are other smaller ones.<\/p>\n<p>The Social Innovation fund, however, fleshes out a full suite of funds supporting research in Alberta. The U of Alberta President, Indira Samarasekera has <a href=\"http:\/\/news.ualberta.ca\/newsarticles\/2014\/march\/research-endowments-an-investment-in-human-prosperity\">praised the establishment of the Social Innovation fund<\/a>\u00a0for this reason. It is the &#8220;third pillar&#8221; of funding (after medical and scientific\/engineering) that will support the social sciences, arts, and humanities.<\/p>\n<p>This leads to questions about <a href=\"http:\/\/www.sbs.ox.ac.uk\/ideas-impact\/skoll\/research\/social-innovation-reports-resources\/social-innovation-what-it-why-it-matters-how-it-can-be-accelerated\">what is Social Innovation<\/a> and \u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/youngfoundation.org\/publications\/how-to-innovate-the-tools-for-social-innovation\/\">How to innovate<\/a>. What could this fund support? How can humanists and artists imagine their research fitting under the rubric social innovation? To answer these questions I have put together a <a href=\"https:\/\/docs.google.com\/document\/d\/18rg0rf3E6iM01C1QAa4SkBYI7cduVPGv4OeY22VSXGA\/edit?usp=sharing\">list of links and readings I found useful <\/a>and will be supplementing it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last month the Province of Alberta proposed to create a Social Innovation Endowment to &#8220;help foster new, solution-oriented approaches to solving Alberta&#8217;s complex social challenges&#8230;&#8221;. The endowment fund will be $1 billion which should generate eventually $45 million a year towards research, knowledge dissemination and prototype partnerships. As a government announcement from March 4th puts &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=5183\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Social Innovation<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-innovation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5183"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5184,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5183\/revisions\/5184"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}