Indy Johar

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Feb 24, 2018 · 8 min read

One of the major programmes we at Dark Matter are working on is developing the institutional infrastructure for innovation at a city scale . The public result of much of this work has been focused on regulatory innovation — also known as the Boring Revolution .

However, increasingly we are starting to recognise the need to focus on another class of innovation crucial to the future of our cities — innovation at a societal level.

Whilst we have seen lots of work, advocacy and progress, focused on advancing innovation in products, platforms, services, and even social innovation (which we think is a lateral class of innovation — spanning products, services, platforms and societal), we have increasingly come to the conclusion societal innovation is different class of innovation with a different typology of outcomes, participation, investment cases and institutional infrastructure.

Societal Innovation is a class of innovation , which functions in the interest of public good (as opposed to the community good) at a societal level and is essential in driving the development of cities. It is not limited to collective self interest of a single community, but includes the interests of those who have not yet been born or arrived or are beyond the boundaries of one specific community.

A near perfect example of societal innovation is - individual immunisation & vaccinations delivering herd immunity across a community; the use of urban big data to improve transportation offers like City Mapper; the unanticipated levels of connectedness afforded by platforms such as Facebook; the value public health infrastructure, urban growth and intensification strategies.

These large-scale interventions, and societal innovations invite micro losses/trades of sovereignty at the individual level in exchange for statistical public benefits accrued at a societal level over the longer term. Be it the dramatic reduction of deaths by TB, the availably of transportation services at the predictive point of need, the predictive management of crime, the possibility of (both regressive and positive) societal behavioural nudges or the theoretical “collective” benefits of urban growth in terms of wages and value creation.

These innovations inherently rely on an progressive social contract — where we all contribute to the developement of shared public good. A social contract for innovation.

In many of these cases, individuals are required to offer up their personal and property sovereignty in exchange for public value creation. Take for example how neighbourhood urban development might invite a local resident to accept the personal loss of rights to light, and experience of additional civic infrastructure “congestion” in exchange for urban intensification and its contribution to the capacity of cities for wealth creation (see Geoffrey West’s work); or individual vaccination and a little prick of pain which provides the benefits of herd immunity to the most vulnerable in society; or the “compromises” of “privacy in urban big data” can release a whole spectrum of new public health & social innovations and so on! (you could in-fact argue Facebook and Twitter are exactly these sorts of innovations which we are failing due to an inadequate social contract).

The 3rd Layer of Innovation.

We have been witnessing the emergence of 3 distinct layers of innovation. The first layer is focused on innovation at an individual level; user-value or consumer centric, manifesting clear transactional gains for both parties exemplified by product and services innovation. The second layer is focused on collective innovation models — which seeks to deliver definable and bounded multi-stakeholder gains — perfectively exemplified by Collective Impact strategies.

The third layer — Innovation at a societal level produces ambient, diffuse but statistically relevant, intangible gains — where individuals are required to surrender aspects of their sovereign rights in exchange. In this class of innovation it is difficult to evidence personally or to feel the impact at the point of intervention (therefore difficult to build easy political legitimacy around). Even with hindsight, the benefits are difficult to ‘feel’ physiologically and personally — “I would not have got TB anyway — no benefit to me” — and perhaps most significantly, even though they manifest on a measurable statistical level, they are usually impactful longitudinal and intergenerational

This third layer of Innovation is built on our capacity to structure and utilise trust, our ability to account for and leverage future outcomes and the emergence of real time, adaptable models of governance. This requires a fundamentally different mode of operating, new infrastructure and new understanding of institutions.

This reading and philosophical comprehension of public goods as requiring individual sovereign losses is not new — it underpins Rousseau’s social contract where people relinquish rights to share the benefits of shared public goods. But what is perhaps new is how we imagine the social contract for innovation — what are the rights, duties, accountabilities for the innovation of shared public goods.

Societal innovation is distinctive in its nature of its outcomes, its essential civic participation, its business/value models and the preconditions required for its existence — an agile, living, participatory social contract platform. As a result, the processes, metrics, models, investment cases and methods used for innovation in commercial, social or technological fields, for example, are not always directly transferable. (We will expanding on this more in our coming writings)

Whilst, we need to acknowledge this model of innovation has existed for many centuries, we increasingly think this class of innovation crucial to our the future of Civilization, for multiple reasons:

1. A Systems reality; we are increasingly becoming both conscious and aware that no innovation is discrete or isolate-able, we are acknowledging the reality no product exists in isolations, and all innovations change “the landscape of future possibilities”, further all innovations draws on public goods, produce known and unknown externalities for all of society (the illusion of the private and isolate-able impact is just that an convenient illusion — see the Diesel Cars exhaust scandal — which has literally driven massive air pollution issues and associated deaths in cities around the world), and increasingly in an Internet of Things age — this connected reality of “products” relies on massive interdependence at a societal level. This is an age where we are designing into systems and rely consciously on public & societal goods, from citizen produced data, to things.
2. Technical viably in the 21st century. Through the emergence of big data/data science, new preventative investment models such as SIBs, and the radical efficacy of organising large scale interventions driven through such things as connected smart contracts — we have created the capacity to understand, democratically contract and intervene (beyond the state) with society itself as “minimum viable unit” as opposed to the individual, the user, the consumer, etc
3. The Urban World: we increasingly are heading for Urban World where some 70% of the worlds population live in cities. This urban future is a future of non divisible, full entanglement, built on economies of agglomeration this is a future fully reliant on societal innovation — in which we all participants.
4. Finally and perhaps most critically the increasing viability of societal innovation is matched by an equally increasing (and urgent) need for new models of intervention to tackle those obstacles to us thriving as a civilisation — be it climate change, structural inequality or the impacts of poverty & social injustice — which will require us all to trade our individual sovereignties and rights to shared societal returns, resilience and renewal.

But whilst these needs have been evident for a while and the technical possibility already here, what is perhaps most urgent to grapple with is are lack of enabling environment — our lack of institutional trust and institutional infrastructure for this new age of innovation.

Actually, in stark contrast to the emerging need and opportunity, we are witnessing the fundamental erosion of the conditions for this model of innovation in democracies across the world.

Institutional ‘Trust’ is in structural decline — for the first time in 2017 the Edelman Trust Barometer study found “a decline in trust across all institutions. In almost two-thirds of the 28 countries surveyed, the general population did not trust the four institutions to “do what is right” — the average level of trust in all four institutions combined was below 50%.” This systemic decline in trust — is perhaps reflective of a foundational failure of clear accountability and governance. Our bureaucracy has struggled to evolve beyond industrial mindsets, practices and techniques to address our new network, systems economic reality and fairly attribute societal contribution and preserve shared societal goods.

This reality is not just hampering the possibility of unleashing new Innovations it is unwinding existing societal goods — be it through the anti-vaccination movement, the rise of NIMBYism in reaction to urban development, the negative sentiment around the use of big data in health, urban innovation, the increasing anti-Facebook, social media discourse. Whilst some of these interventions are rightly being challenged -what is central to their failure is the failure of Goverance, accountability, regulation and institution design to create the legitimate societal conditions for citizens to trade sovereign rights and goods for the creation and innovation of new shared public goods.

In contrast, more centralised regimes are driving forward with these societal innovations and experiments, see China — its use of predictive policing, social credit system, is succeeding in pushing forward this class of innovation. We are in no-way arguing democracies need to replicate this reality, rather democracies need to find new ways to create the conditions for societal scale innovation — as this reality is upon us we must realise and continue to show my Ludditism is no solution. There are opportunities for real civilisation gains, driving a new class of social economic justice is significant, if we can create the fertile democratic conditions.

Society as the Minimum Viable Unit:

It is increasingly evident. we have an opportunity and a need to unlock the societal innovation capacity of AI, smart connect contracts, machine learning, big data, sustainable urban & rural development, peer2peer infrastructure, next generation welfare 2.0 etc, but unlocking this equitable future needs us to build the shared accountability, trust and the democratised capacity to innovate.

This future is fundamentally reliant on us:

1. Redesigning Governance, legitimacy, accountability fit for the fully code & systems age by re-imagining accounting, regulation, incentives, data rights etc.
2. Democracy 2.0: Developing a next generation of democracies beyond our current industrial, representative models.
3. Democratizing the capacity for Innovation both in terms of production and its return of societal investment, for these futures to be structurally legitimate they cannot be the domain and reserve of the guided few but imagined and made by the many.
4. Collective recognize there is no single owner or player in this domain, this innovation needs collective intelligence and collective responsibility to our shared tomorrow. This innovation invites us to transcend our collective interest and enhance the public interest for all our futures.
5. Recognize, our cities are at the break point of this future. They present the convergence of our greatest challenges (climate adaption, inclusive economies, post automation economics etc) and our greatest capacities to respond, with their increasing devolved political, economic and social legitimacy, agency and power.

This is a model of innovation in which the ‘I’ — the individual, consumer, citizen — must become ‘we’ and we must all invest together and reap the rewards of a 21st Century civilization & city together. This is a class of innovation which need an agile, accountable, adaptive and participatory social contract (perhaps even one which transcends its metaphysical conception.)

In the writing, critique and contribution to this provocation I would like to thank Andy Reeve Jayne Engle jack minchella giulio quaggiotto Chloe Treger