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I was wondering how I should describe innovations that deal with challenges of conflicting parties on an governmental, national or even international level a couple of weeks ago. Thinking of a common nominator I ended up thinking about societies.  Although it might be kind ob obvious I’m still kind of unsure if this really nails it or if it would be another fuzz/buzzword. The question is, should an area of innovation be named after the intended solution such as social - making it more open to be to applied to various fields – or after the are of the intended application/target group that it will server, such as human (centered) innovation.

From my understanding, human centered innovation clearly focuses on all things which are related to human beings and can therefore be seen as a superior group if we think of hierarchies. So the question would be if this classification would make sense. Societal Innovation in the way I thought about it, would be focused on groups of people and how there relate to each other. Therefor Societal innovation focuses on the improvement of the persistent relationships of groups of people (Wikipedia) such as tribes, political parties, states …

In contrast to human or  centered innovation, this will impact the tools that might be relevant in terms of analyzing, developing and evaluating as well as implementing new innovations. Things like a group dynamics, networks and systems have to bee taken into account in order take the interactivity into account. Areas like rules and regulations, culture and history have to be considered to really understand problems and solutions.

In regards to social innovation, which is targeted towards social needs/impact, Societal Innovation is open to target areas which don’t necessarily have a social impact, such as: policies, political actions, business regulations etc. since they all impact the way groups of people relate to each other.

These are just a couple of quick thoughts on the topic since I’m curious to see how others/you will reflect on it :)