A Year of Pushback to Save Social Innovation

Most years, we write one (or two) Fixes columns about the year in social innovation. What were the big ideas, the new trends?

This year, it’s tempting to sum all that up in a word: Ha!

Never has social innovation seemed less relevant.

Although the federal government is never the most nimble innovator, it’s normally a prime consumer and amplifier of social innovation. And at times, Washington does produce new ideas—for example, in the Obama administration, federal agencies held prize competitions to solve problems. It was a fast and cheap way to stimulate novel solutions to challenges ranging from detecting moon craters among billions of space images to creating an app to let consumers know if restaurants cheat their workers.