About

How do we make the social innovation field more than the sum of its parts?

What should we aspire to achieve over the next 10 years?

Each Wayfinder is a two-day global social innovation event exploring what more can be achieved over the next 10 years in the field of social innovation. We invite global participants that have played, will continued to play, or will soon play a critical role in applying social innovation to the large scale systemic challenges of the 21st century. A Wayfinder is a future-facing convening to catalyse the social innovation field to become more than the sum of its parts.

The Wayfinder is a direction-setting event convened and curated by the global Social Innovation Exchange, in collaboration with global partners, exploring the future of social innovation. A Wayfinder event helps organisations lay or strengthen the foundations of a social innovation ecosystem in a country or community.

Background

Seen through one lens, social innovation has achieved a huge amount over the last decade, but compared to the scale of social challenges facing the world, this success looks marginal. We don’t have enough examples of social innovation creating large scale, deep and systemic change. Only tiny fractions of commercial investment and public spending contribute to social innovation, and the scale of social innovation institutions pales in comparison to their equivalents in technology, the military or medicine.

SIX invites a select select group of 150 global experts from across six continents that have played, and will continue to play, a critical role in building the social innovation field. We explore what more can be done to bridge the current gaps to create large scale systemic change and further advance the field of social innovation for the next 10 years.

Together, participants of the Wayfinder work to address how to make the field more than the sum of its parts. The event draws on a mapping of the state of social innovation globally in different sectors and regions over the last 10 years. At the end of the two days together, we aim to set some priority areas for joint action in the next 10 years

Key questions we will explore include:

• What kind of infrastructure do we need locally, nationally, regionally and globally to make the most of social innovation in the next decade?

• What kind of funding is needed at a systems level? How can we build capacity and institutional leadership inside systems?
• And how can we bring in mainstream actors who buy the core principles of social innovation, but don’t use the language?