Dr Eric Li explains how the UBC Social Innovation Hub is helping to build a better future with agile, sustainable, and multifaceted community-university partnerships.
The COVID-19 pandemic has profoundly impacted various facets of life in Canada and globally, affecting individual relationships, institutional operations, and international supply chains and collaborations. It has exposed the interconnectedness and vulnerability of complex systems. In response to the challenges of the post-pandemic world, social innovation, social entrepreneurship, social enterprise, social financing, and social business are increasingly recognised as innovative solutions and mechanisms.
The UBC Social Innovation Hub emphasises the multi-stakeholder model, aiming to design and nurture high-impact social innovations, social enterprises, and social businesses. It is also committed to educating the next generation of social innovators and entrepreneurs while fostering long-term collaborations with key partners and communities both locally and globally.
The work of the Social Innovation Hub
The Social Innovation Hub focuses on three main pillars:
Social Innovation Research Network
The Hub facilitates a diverse range of research projects and partnerships and establish an international social innovation research network to connect Canadian scholars with global collaborators and partners.
Social Innovation Learning
The Hub co-ordinates courses, work-integrated learning (WIL) programmes, and other experiential learning activities to engage educators, learners, and community partners at all levels, promoting a deeper understanding of social innovation.
Social Innovation Incubator
The Hub collaborates with key partners to develop a ‘humanitarian-centric’ social innovation incubator. This new programme also supports the development of social businesses, social enterprises, Indigenous social ventures, and other socially-driven enterprises.
Bridging the community-academia gap
Community-university engagement is at the core of the Hub’s approach to innovation. By fostering engagement between academia and the broader community, the Hub aims to enhance collaboration, co-creation, knowledge sharing, and expertise.
Another guiding principle for the Hub’s innovation strategy is inclusivity. By involving stakeholders from multiple sectors and disciplines, the Hub ensures a collaborative, inclusive, sustainable, and participatory approach to solving today’s complex problems. The socio-economic dynamics of current challenges are intricate, necessitating collaboration among the public sector, private sector, academia, industry leaders, community leaders, ecosystem enablers, innovators, and entrepreneurs. The Hub serves as a key integrator, connecting relevant stakeholders across various sectors and disciplines.
Current themes of the Hub’s work include:
Health and wellness
The Social Innovation Hub is dedicated to advancing social innovation research to address diverse health challenges and concerns both within and beyond Canada.
Food system and food security
The Hub works with local, regional, national, and international partners to co-develop innovative social ventures that support food production, redistribution, and consumption in local and global food systems.
Sustainable production and consumption
In alignment with Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12 ‘Responsible Consumption and Production’, the Hub aims to reduce carbon footprints by promoting eco-friendly production systems and responsible consumption, thereby building climate resilience.
Climate resilience
The Hub collaborates with partners, educators, and learners to co-develop an ecosystem that supports ‘planet-first’ social innovation.
Affordable housing
The Hub is committed to addressing the issue of homelessness by working on affordable housing projects, contributing to the development of sustainable cities and communities and reducing inequality within communities.
These themes provide direction for team building. Developing a sustainable and resilient platform to support social innovation and the establishment of social ventures is crucial. The Hub also creates an integrated impact measurement mechanism to capture social impact and outcomes.
Please note, this article will also appear in the 19th edition of our quarterly publication.
