Social Innovation: Creativity in the Transformation of Day-to-Day Life

Creative ideas, and the innovations which flow from them, transform many aspects of our lives. Although we typically think of innovation as an aspect of technology or the arts, innovation also occurs in our social lives. In the present effort, we examine the nature and significance of various social innovations as representations of transformational creativity. Subsequently, we examine the empirical evidence bearing on the key skills needed for social innovation. We find evidence for a number of skills, including problem definition, causal analysis, forecasting, constraint analysis, planning, and wisdom. The implications of these observations for the development of people’s capacity for social innovation and transformational creativity are discussed.