Engineer in a social sector

How does and engineer develop the entrepreneurship and the innovation in a social sector?

To offer a possible alternative the first thing we have to know are the concepts of what social innovation and entrepreneurship means. “The social innovation can be defined as the development and implementation of new ideas (products, services and models) to satisfy the social needs, create new social relationships and offer better results. It works as an answer to the social demands that affect the social interaction process, improving the human welfare.

The social innovations are the ones that aren’t just good for the society but improve the act capacity of the people. They are based on creativity of the citizens, the civil social organizations, the local communities or the companies. They are and opportunity for both the public sector and for the markets, so the products and services satisfy the individual and collective aspirations.”

Knowing what a social innovation means bring us a new face of what an engineer can do, unlike everybody thinks (Even the most of the engineers), a social innovation doesn’t mean talking with all the people in the world to make an innovation, in fact, it only means you have to see for the people and there is where everyone have a problem, How to do a social innovation if everybody thinks in different ways?, well, the social innovation have 4 main elements:

• Identify the new, cover or uncover social needs.
• Development of new solutions in reply to these social needs.
• Evaluation of the new social needs effectiveness to satisfy the social needs.
• Enlargement of the effective social innovations.

So moving on with these elements we can have an idea of what to do to have a social innovation. On an engineer eyes in global context it seems pretty easy, just identify a social need and solve it, but, Is it that simple? , the answer obviously is no, in line with the main elements we have to identify the need, develop the solution, evaluate it and finally if it is effective enough to have “green light”, we need to find a way so enlarge it, so here we have two big problems:

1. How to do an effective solution for the social needs.
2. How to enlarge the social innovation when it’s actually ready.

On one hand and maybe the most important hand we have to do an effective solution, to reach this goal we need to know the resources and limitations we have for the social solution, normally in the social innovation we need to see for the people side rather than the industry one, so, if we are planning to do a big social company, the first think to look is, How many jobs will it bring to the community?, then, How many pollution will it produce? and finally but not less important, How will this project affect the life of the people?.

Starting with the pollution one, we as engineers have to look for the people health, that means no pollution for water, air or earth or at least doing a very little amount of pollution, because, accept it, it is near impossible to do an industrial job without a little amount of pollution, but as we are doing a social innovation the best thing we can do is try to get the most environment friendly work we can do.

Then let’s talk about the job question, the amount of people that will get a job will be different in any social innovation, some will need more, some will need less, the important fact here is to give the most jobs as possible, and effective way to do it it’s by making the company a craft one, What I am referring to?, well a company where the people are the ones that make the product in majority rather than a machine, that’s when we have a social company and normally a “craft company” make less pollution than a machine one, so we solve two points in one.

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