Principles For Social Innovation In 2012: Follow Emerging Economies

Alnoor Ladha and Tim Dixon

This year marks the fifth anniversary of the beginning of the global financial crisis--a crisis that is changing the global economy just as significantly as the collapse of communism in 1989 and the OPEC oil crisis of 1973.

A major impact of the financial meltdown is that global markets are now being driven by the world’s emerging economies. The economies of the U.S. and Europe have entered a long period of sluggish growth, financial instability, rising debt, and relative decline. They still provide great opportunities for innovators--developed country markets will remain the world’s largest for some years to come. But the furnace of the global economy is now being powered by the white heat of industrialization in the East and South--economies like China, Brazil, Mexico, India, and Nigeria.

That means that the locus of social, economic, and even cultural innovation is shifting as well. This historic shift requires those of us who work at this intersection to re-evaluate priorities, change strategies, and create new types of innovations rooted in this new balance of power. For social innovators, we offer three tactics: focusing on the new middle classes of emerging economies, engaging them with technology, and building new global social movements.

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