The world, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic, has suffered enough. So many people have lost their lives, and on top of that, people are losing their lives financially due to the rise in inflation across many sectors. In the year 2022, it has truly become the survival of the fittest. The same is the case with online business and the corporate sector. When companies or organizations involve their employees in corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities, it is able to convey the relevance of social innovation to the audience efficiently.
Social innovations overlap with social entrepreneurship. Both of these terms complement each other but are slightly different from one another. When discussing social entrepreneurship, the organization prefers to address the social issues in a particular environment or a society. If we talk about social intrapreneurship, the company plays a role in the evolution of the innovation of the desired products and services. There are many intrapreneurship examples that you can find in the corporate sector.
What is Social Innovation?
To become a successful entrepreneur today, you must know what is social innovation. It is defined as developing effective solutions to bring a change in the environment. It influences or identifies the problems found within the society. This method creates solutions through online collaboration within the internet environment of a particular company. The desire to bring social change can only happen through the collaboration of different units in a business or non-profit organization. There is a reason why social intrapreneurship is a massive part of a business’ growth and consistency.
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Some people define social intrapreneurship as the innovative social practices to get to the social needs more quickly than practical solutions. When the current educational sectors, private organizations, community health, and other sectors are not prioritizing the online community, steps must be taken to improve the situation. Social intrapreneurship includes expansive criteria involved in social interaction, social aims, and social results. As we are slowly but surely moving towards a digitized world, companies are starting to integrate it as part of their business operations.
Impact of Social Innovation on a Business
People often ask why social innovation is even that important when social entrepreneurs claim the responsibility of improving the environment. However, the truth is that numerous implementing organizations begin as lone warriors, doing their struggles for different social causes. They possess exquisite leadership skills and have the ability to build a crowd around them. Some individuals create an even bigger impact by forming industry-wide environmental objectives and telling their followers to work blood and sweat on them.
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When a company claims that it wants to work on social intrapreneurship objectives with full optimism, the key stakeholders combine as they understand the value of the invested effort. Even though social intrapreneurship focuses more on the impact it makes rather than the profit it brings, shareholders are also recommended to contribute to these social causes to achieve long-term social benefits. The initiatives of social intrapreneurship differ in terms of objectives created and the main person in charge of the social cause. When we talk about social intrapreneurship, the focus is more on the impact it brings to the environment rather than the financial gains.
Benefits of Social Innovation
1. Inventive Solutions
One of the most influential benefits of social innovation is that it enables businesses to introduce inventive solutions for the betterment of society. These solutions create an image of the company being innovative, which helps preserve its brand image.
2. Utilization of Skills
Another one of the huge benefits of social innovation is that it enables the employees to understand and showcase their wide range of skills. The employees can recognize their skills, talent, and passion for benefiting the suffering communities. Working hard to earn a huge chunk of revenue is one thing, but doing a struggle to bring a change within an environment is another level of satisfaction. When the employees of a company join forces to contribute positively to a social cause, they can build better relationships. This also helps them to maintain their productivity standards.
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As employees get involved in a unique way of collaboration, they start finding more encouraging signs to stick with their company in the long run. Usually, after a specific time, many professionals think about parting ways with the company and going to another one. However, when they find out that a company is doing more than just filling their pockets, they decide against their initial plans and choose to stick with them for longer.
3. Partnership with the Social Sector
The partnership with the social sector and the other community members can be classified as one of the most meaningful benefits of social innovation. This strategic partnership enables the corporate leaders to look at different things from the audience's perspective and try to solve their problems instantly.
4. Source of Income
As we have said before, the world has suffered a lot since 2020. The COVID-19 pandemics, the political conflicts like we see in Ukraine and the rising inflation across many sectors have disrupted a common human life in more ways than one. In such cases, why social innovation is important? It is important because it gives you a chance to have passive income alongside your professional job.
Even though we have talked about the fact that social intrapreneurship focuses more on the impact rather than the financial gains if the impact is huge and produces long-term benefits, one of those benefits can be a huge chunk of revenue. Regardless of how you do in your professional job, you will know that your pocket is not drying up because of a passive source of income. When people are struggling to meet the demands of inflation (as we have seen in Sri Lanka recently), you must have a passive source of income to maintain financial stability.
Importance of Having a Social Innovation Website
1. Online Presence
As the relevance of social innovation efforts can be seen by your company’s hard work, you must present those efforts on the internet and increase your company’s online presence. If you want to create an online presence for your company, the best way to do so is by creating a website through a high-quality website builder, such as Strikingly. Creating fully-functional websites can spread your message to different audience sections about your social causes.
Image taken from Strikingly
At Strikingly, you will find many website owners that have created websites based on social causes. Some of the individuals own non-profit organizations that are created to implement social entrepreneurship for society’s benefit. If you also want to talk about the social causes you have participated in, you can do that by writing it on your corporate website. Strikingly enables you to create a fully-functional website by customizing one of the mobile-friendly website templates that we have provided. Once you customize them as per your niche, you can start adding all the content related to your social causes.
2. Audience Perspective
When you find answers to the question of what is social innovation, make sure that your answers are relevant to the audience's perspective. If you talk about controversial or conspiring issues on your public forum, there is every chance that you will let your target customers down. Once you get some attraction because of your social causes, you can start building an online community to discuss further details about your plans.
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By creating an online community, you will get a chance to increase brand awareness and engage with your audience for a more personalized cause. Strikingly believes that by creating an online community, you can improve your brand further and discuss all the technical details related to your website. For that reason, we provide our customers with an idea forum feature. On the idea forum, many customers and clients collaborate and talk about everything that is going well or bad on Strikingly.
Conclusion
In your life, you will find many people in the world that are just doing random jobs to fill their pockets. You will realize that all of them have different satisfaction levels. Some are satisfied by the number of hours they put in a particular shift. Some individuals are satisfied by their pay rise after a specific time. However, you will also find some people who are satisfied by working hard on different social causes. Their relevance to social innovation brings satisfaction to them and the entire society.
Strikingly also believes in working for different social causes. Our quality website development features bring ease of usability for our users. We help you focus on improving your business's productivity as we take responsibility for your website’s technical aspects. We work hard to ensure the growth of your business in the long run. By showing sincerity to our audience, we can maintain high standards for our social causes and the website supporting them.
