Reinventing Innovation 06/04/09
Extract
Social innovation
Another new-school approach to innovation is using design to tackle social problems. Take MeetUp, a service now being developed by the British social design group Participle to combat loneliness among elderly people. As the elderly population has expanded, loneliness has become a serious problem, and is proven to aggravate neurological conditions, like Alzheimer’s disease. The standard solution is to invite seniors to group activities in the hope that they will make friends there, but it seldom works.
MeetUp was devised as a subtler and more effective way of enabling them to get to know each other. It begins by coordinating telephone discussions among elderly people with shared interests. Once they have bonded, they are offered the chance to be taken by scooter or minibus to meet in person. They can also participate in joint activities, like gardening and cooking, from their homes. “If you dump people in a roomful of strangers they retreat into their shells,” said Hilary Cottam, founding director of Participle. “The insight was to help them to form their own groups of like-minded people. We prototyped MeetUp for six months, and have proved that it works and that it can save a significant amount of money on health care and social services.”
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