Social Innovation Summit: Connecting Social Innovators From Sweden and Beyond

On November 25th, Alexander Bugge, Strategic Project Manager at REFUNITE, attended the Social Innovation Summit in Malmö, Sweden. The conference was attended by entrepreneurs, change agents, innovators, decision-makers, investors and financiers, working together to find new, innovative solutions to some of the biggest social issues in Sweden and beyond.

Alexander was part of a panel that focused on the future of financing digital social innovation, and how new, digital approaches can create new opportunities for the social innovation sector. Nesta, a charity that works to increase the innovation capacity in the UK, found that there is a lot of social innovation being funded, but that organizations are disconnected from each other. Peter Baeck of Nesta mentioned the importance of providing an open source for all that is going on in social innovation, and foster communication between social innovators in order to create a more cohesive community.

A topic of debate was that the reason for why many social innovation startups fails are due to them reinventing existing open source technologies. Alexander said that the debate lacked a vital element to social innovation startup success; product-market fit and effective marketing strategies. He stressed that success is impossible without a desirable product, but that having a desirable product does not guarantee success. He continued to argue the importance of doing customer development interviews to maximize the likelihood of developing products a small initial market demands, and employ marketers to grow that market while maintaining a dominant position. ‘Technology can solve a lot of tough problems, but too many genius technologies are not adopted due to poor business models and absence of sound marketing strategies’.