How Can Integrated Innovation Advance Well-being and Inclusive Growth?

Despite some significant efforts and focus in recent years, the field of social innovation lags behind in terms of infrastructure, capacity, policy development, incentives, and investment. How might we seize the opportunity of the Review of Canada's Innovation Policy to shape an innovation strategy that also supports new and scale-ready innovations that accelerate Canadians’ wellbeing? On May 18th, 2016, the Public Policy Forum and Social Innovation Generation (SiG) convened federal government, social entrepreneurs, academia, social innovation intermediaries, and business leaders in Ottawa to identify the conditions that enable social innovation prior to the policy process on social innovation and innovation broadly. Through facilitated discussions, we gained insight into the perspectives on Canada’s current innovation ecosystem, barriers for organizations advancing wellbeing using social innovation, and identified policy changes and conditions for strengthening social innovation in Canada. This summary document highlights key themes from the discussions and identifies where additional action was recommended by the participants.