Killer Innovations: reblog

Inspired by the new Stanford social innovation podcast series as well as IBM's rallying cry of innovation that matters, I've added a new category to the Business Innovation Insider: social innovation. Social innovation is all around us, yet is rarely noticed by the mainstream media or even by bloggers. Social innovators don't have big R&D budgets or hyperactive PR departments to get the word out, yet their solutions to solve social problems are surprisingly powerful. For example, the Wall Street Journal (link via Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) is running a two-part series on innovative ways of fighting hunger in America. As the Wall Street Journal points out, social innovation is emerging as a real tool to combat a problem (i.e. hunger) that has bedeviled the U.S. since the 1960s:

"Despite decades of economic growth and technological progress, tens of millions of Americans still live in poverty. Efforts to reduce the ranks of the poor persist, but they have moved underground. Today's War on Poverty isn't marked by lofty presidential rhetoric. It is a guerilla war with platoons of idealistic crusaders and skeptical scholars, with dozens of small-scale experiments and local initiatives that largely escape public notice."

Yesterday, for example, the Wall Street Journal featured a a heartbreaking story by Roger Thurow about "backpack clubs" that are spreading throughout the USA as a way to combat poverty in rural and suburban areas. In the U.S, there are now 13.5 million households that have limited or no access to food as a result of financial duress. In the face of overwhelming evidence showing that traditional programs to combat poverty are not working as planned, social innovators are trying to come up with new solutions to fight hunger.

The "backpack clubs" described by Roger Thurow solve this problem in a low-cost, easy-to-implement manner: suburban kids fill up their backpacks with food on Fridays, share this food with their families over the weekend, and bring back empty backpacks on Monday. Using school backpacks helps kids avoid the stigma of being poor, and ensures that kids (and their parents) eat well over the weekend. It's an amazing article and really sheds some light on a problem that afflicts an astounding number of Americans. Kudos to the Wall Street Journal for having the courage to put this article on the front page of the paper.

Tags: socialinnovation backpackclubs

[image: At the Foodbank via Team MBA]