The Future is Collective Advancing Collective Social Innovation to Address Societys Biggest Challenges 2025

Collective social innovators create impacts that reverberate beyond single issues and organizations. These innovators “lay the foundations” for large-scale social impact, enabling organizations to scale impact even further. These foundational impacts include: –Developing new narratives that enable diverse groups to work together –Tapping into grassroots knowledge and talent to better identify and deliver social innovations –Finding novel ways to value and manage collective resources –Collecting and distributing expansive datasets to shape policy and decision-making –Assembling and allocating financial resources efficiently and effectively Collective social innovators organize themselves differently than traditional organizations. These innovators: –Create collective architectures to mobilize vast constituencies –Develop collective pathways that enable shared action with flexibility –Conduct collective activities that amplify change efforts and ensure momentum for change –Build supportive infrastructures that ensure adaptability and stability while bringing together multiple stakeholders Finally, collective social innovators enable new relationships with and engagement from stakeholders. They enable: –Partners, including the private sector, to reduce fragmentation, while tapping into a vast repository of ideas and participating in collective problem-solving –Funders and investors, to build critical ecosystems that allow many organizations to flourish –Government and policy-makers, to align interests, access critical data and achieve population-level scale The Schwab Foundation invites you to consider how you might use these lessons to support collective action in your area of interest. Humanity’s most unique skill is developing new ways to collaborate across ever-larger groups: the time to harness this talent to its full potential is now. Image credit: Schwab Foundation Collective Action Convening 2024 The Future is Collective: Advancing Collective Social Innovation to Address Society’s Biggest Challenges 6