Bryan Boyer

Social Innovation Interests

For me, social innovation is a forgone conclusion, a course correction for a society ailing under its own rigid cultures of decision making. During the past couple hundred years our society has flourished under a notion of externalization—that we focus on some things and leave other aspects out of the equation—originally designed to make decisions easier to make.

The most extreme example, of course, is our economy, which has grown exponentially by externalizing the environmental and social costs of its acceleration. Now that we’ve recognized this as a society, we need to figure out what to do about it.

Just as an architect cannot design a house without thinking of the city it’s situated within, we now know that business cannot act in a vacuum from previously-external costs. Nor can government externalize its own budgets. Social Innovation is an excuse to glue things back together.

Social Innovation Experience

My own focus is split between design and entrepreneurship. These are the two areas I know best, having trained and worked as an architect and before that launching and then working at a handful of technology start-ups in silicon valley. These days I’m focused on how we build or implement innovations: what does it mean to execute a project that is designed to have systemic implications?

Having a good idea is one thing, and there’s certainly a lot of room to develop new ways to find the right ideas, but on their own concepts can only ever be exciting. I’m interested in how we move beyond enthusiasm, into impact.

Looking forward—Social Innovation Aspirations

For the long run, I’m excited to see how social innovation disrupts the institutions of the everyday. If we look around in twenty years time and realize that an ethos of shared value, of agility, and of cooperative effort have seeped into the core of our businesses, governments, and other institutions we’ll know that SIX and others have really delivered.