Canada’s social impact sector has built a high level of capacities, capabilities and standards in areas such as volunteer management, donor stewardship, and program delivery. While this merits recognition, there is also a growing consensus that problem-solving in the 21st century requires us to ramp up capacity and capability building in social R&D.

In the early stages of development, we focus on four main areas of enhancement for social and grantmaking organizations:

• Demystifying R&D and demonstrating it in action
• Catalyzing a community of practice
• Highlighting and sharing practices
• Influencing policy

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To enhance Canada’s innovation system so that it generates inclusive growth and advances Canadian prosperity, a concerted, comprehensive strategy is needed. This involves integrating STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) as well as business and social innovation, using resources that enable the incubation of ideas and products, market access, procurement, talent development, social financing and partnership building.

Deploying an integrative strategy will result in federal funding bodies and policy-makers accelerating:

• the integration of STEM as well as business and social innovation as the cornerstones of the Canadian Government’s Innovation Agenda, focusing innovation policy on reaching linked economic and social goals (shared value)
• a targeted plan to leverage social innovation as a mainstream practice and further develop the ecosystem of social innovators in response to core government goals for reconciliation, youth leadership, the next economy, climate change, etc.

Ecosystems are an analogy to help us to think about and frame the systems in which we live. They reflect the generative power and complexity of both human and natural systems.

Why Ecosystems for Systems Change?

• Complex problems are entrenched in systems; it takes a systems view to identify root causes.
• As a result, the social innovation movement is necessarily enmeshed across sectors and scales.
• Our greatest opportunity for tackling complex problems will be when dynamic, healthy innovation ecosystems produce outcomes that are greater than the sum of their parts.

We can be intentional about fostering systemic conditions that enable social innovation. In pursuit of our mission, we have learned much about feeding healthy social innovation ecosystems.