How can a society imagine, create and evolve? How can it be more alive? How can it grow in social and psychological terms, not just materially? Here I share ways of thinking about social creativity, generativity and innovation – their ethics and aesthetics as well as their tools and systems. I analyse the uneven dynamics of social systems – which allow some to innovate intensively, while others do not; I describe the ethos and culture of social innovation; and I look at where social innovation happens on the boundaries of states, markets, civil society and the household.

Worlds in motion

Our current era is unusual in its enthusiasm for innovation. In ancient Greek, innovation or kainotomia was a largely political concept, while in Latin in novo was a theological idea, meaning renewal or a return to the original soul, which related to Christian concepts of rebirth or regeneration. In a later period, innovation came to refer to things that had to be crushed. In the mid-16th century the English king Edward VI issued a famous proclamation ‘Against Those That Doeth Innovate’; innovation meant heresy. When, several centuries later, the term ‘innovation’ was linked to the word ‘social’ for the first time, the combination was intended to be pejorative: William Sargant's Social Innovators and Their Scheme, published in 1858, used the term as a stick to criticise reformers who wanted to overthrow the social order and private property. Innovations were designs, but designs in the sense of conspiracies or plots.

So, how did innovation become a good thing, and one that could be usefully extended to society? The simple answer is that modernity in its broadest sense has lent any discussion of social innovation a very different tone to any equivalent discussion in medieval Europe or ancient China. Since the 18th century the world has been in motion both in its physical facts and in its mentalities entirely because of innovation. The charts show this dramatically. Many measures before around 1800 show very little change over centuries and millennia, despite empires rising and falling. Then they start pointing up, the lines twitching into an inverted ‘J’ of near-exponential rises in material prosperity; life expectancy; energy use; communications; mobility; population.