Building Social Innovation Ecosystems for Change

What does it take to go beyond individual efforts and towards the kind of collaboration that drives social impact at scale?

A new playbook from the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship at the University of Oxford explores this question through the experiences of organizations working to create lasting social and environmental change. WeRobotics is honoured to be featured as one of five case studies in Building Social Innovation Ecosystems for Change: Bridging Diverse Stakeholders to Shape Ecosystems for Social Impact.

It takes considerable work to bring together diverse actors in spaces where they can connect their strengths and achieve more together. A lot of that work happens in ways that are often difficult to quantify: building relationships, creating trust, clarifying roles, and tending to the people infrastructure that makes collaboration effective. Tracking, measuring, and making this work visible takes some creativity and a very different way of determining what matters — and this, in turn, can pose challenges when it comes to being legible to funders and other stakeholders.

We have experienced this firsthand, which is why building and strengthening collaborative ecosystems is now a central focus of our work. Part of the secret sauce that makes our approach to ecosystem building impactful is putting people at the centre, along with their unique knowledge, priorities, and relationships. In the video below, Cynthia Rayner, one of the researchers behind the playbook and the author of the WeRobotics case study, offers an illustration of why our approach to ecosystem building is unique.

We are grateful to the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship for including WeRobotics and the Flying Labs Network in this research, and to Cynthia Rayner, Marya Besharov, and Jessica Jacobson for taking the time to understand our work and document the lessons emerging from it. It is our hope that this playbook will spark new conversations among social innovators and guide funders and policymakers to support ecosystem builders with greater intention. 

We invite you to read Building Social Innovation Ecosystems for Change and engage with the valuable reflections presented on social innovation, systems change, and the work of using ecosystems to create social impact that lasts.