DESIGNING THE WAY TO INNOVATION AND POSITIVE CHANGE
Social Innovation Booster, and the positive change we are trying to create, was featured in an article, written by Tove Nordström for the Social Entrepreneurship Forum.
Hi Susanna, please tell us a bit about Social Innovation Booster and how it works!
The aim with Social Innovation Booster is to empowering changemakers to design solutions to our world's complex challenges. We are offering ‘Booster Programs’ where we help you build your innovation step by step so it aligns with your purpose and with your users' needs. You get your own coach and mentor who is working hands-on with you through the entire development process. Many of our participants claim that their coach and mentor becomes like a team member, but ‘on-demand’ and risk free.
Why is it needed?
Our world is changing fast and we are forced to rethink our career, purpose and life. Many people have great ideas and suggestions for how to solve the complex challenges our world is facing, but don’t know where to start.
When developing a new idea or business, it helps to simplify the complexity and involve the people that need to be involved in developing the solution. This is what service designers do! But this expertise is usually only accessible to larger organisations that have the resources to work with consultants or have built up this expertise in-house. I founded Social Innovation Booster with the aim of democratizing the access to these tools and processes, making them available to anyone who has an impactful idea.
It is such a great user centered approach, and very useful in all stages of entrepreneurship. The Booster Programmes are 100% online and open to anyone – there are no requirements and no application process; you just need to have an idea and a drive to make a difference.
What are the main benefits of going through this process?
In the Booster Programs, you learn how to build your innovation on user insights, which makes it more likely that you build a relevant, purposeful and sustainable service or business. Developing the right features from the start saves you time and money early in the process.
What’s your background and how did you end up developing Social Innovation Booster?
I am a service and business designer and entrepreneur. I was one of the early adopters of service design and worked at Sweden’s first service design agency that grew very fast. I then started my own business, Expedition Mondial, together with two co-founders. I worked for many years with the Swedish public sector helping them rethink and design their services to align with the needs of the citizens. When moving to Norrsken House (a co-working space for impact entrepreneurs in Stockholm), I started working with impact entrepreneurs, at accelerators like SE Forum’s, as a teacher and mentor. We merged the traditional lean startup approach with the service design/design thinking approach. I noticed how this framework helped entrepreneurs to build more relevant services and focus on developing the right features from the start.
Today I live in the San Francisco bay area and founded Social Innovation Booster to democratize the access to service and business design expertise. I wanted to support people who normally wouldn’t have access to this framework as I believe there are so many innovative solutions to our world’s complex challenges that can be unleashed if change makers get the confidence and the skills to design them!
What’s next for the Social Innovation Booster?
I am currently introducing new teachers and Booster Programmes on the platform! I’m very excited to soon be able to offer programmes run by my partners with a focus on Impact Modelling, Impact Branding and Marketing on the Social Innovation Booster platform. My dream is to provide an ‘on-demand team’ of highly skilled experts within different areas that can support change makers in building on their dreams to create positive change, through the programmes.
This article was originally published by Tove Nordström for SE-forum, and you can find it here. Social Innovation Booster was featured in an article written by Tove Nordström, executive director of SE Forum. We proudly recite the article here: