For the past couple of months, we’ve been thinking about who we are, what we do and what we want to achieve. Aided by Rachel Botsman and with great input from a number of people in the social innovation community, we’ve been refining the way ASIX should define its identity and purpose.

We need designers and designers need us.

What struck me about the discussions in Melbourne and Sydney, with Ezio Manzini as part of the recent social innovators dialogue road shows, was the slight hesitation by those on both sides of the discussion about design and social innovation about whether and, if so, how they should each be dealing with the other.

This is my take.

I was able to get to some of the sessions with Ezio Mazini this week in Melbourne and Sydney. This is the first installment of some reflections on his insights and some of the discussions that emerged in the lively sessions with CEOs, business people and the design community.

In no particular order of significance or importance...

http://whatmatters.mckinseydigital.com/social_entrepreneurs/the-economic...

In their report for the EU Commission, the Social Innovation Exchange (SIX) spent some time rehearsing the mix and range of definitions of social innovation.

In any new field of endeavour, there is always a deal of debate about definitions and boundaries. Social innovation is no different. What is included, what is excluded, how do you define social innovation in a way that is distinctive and predictive? How do you avoid using the term simply as a re-badging for other activities like charity, philanthropy or the third sector?

In the end, the SIX report puts forward this definition:

I read somewhere that the defining characteristics of social innovators are optimism, creativity and democracy. It's a powerful cocktail. And it's on show, in spades, at the Social Innovation Camp going on right now in Sydney. It's Australia's first try at the Camp model, which the Australian Social Innovation Exchange picked up from its global network, in this case from the UK and Europe. With the generous help of the Centre for Social Impact at UNSW, we're trying out this approach to finding, and rapidly developing, promising ideas for social change.

The first Social Innovation camp which is being held on 5-7 March has already generated a great deal of interest. Projects have been selected from a pool of ideas posted on the ASIX site, teams of people are getting ready to work on their ideas and there is a nice sense of anticipation.

How will we measure the success of this first attempt to work with a new method for identifying and kick starting the development of promising social innovation proposals?

The debate about social innovation has reached an interesting point. In any ways, it has been a something of a "poor cousin" in many of the big debates about how we should tackle difficult social challenges that impact our life in common.