It’s the end of day one at the World Economic Forum Summit on the Global Agenda, and I’m sitting in my rather comfortable hotel room overlooking Palm Island, trying to pull my thoughts together. It was a day for meeting old friends, making new acquaintances, listening to stirring speeches and exploring new challenges.  As you would expect from a 700 person-strong brainstorm, there were moments of disorientation and confusion.  But even these were stimulating in their own way – rather cleverly, the World Economic Forum has orchestrated a setting where serendipity becomes commonplace.

The real meat of the Summit begins tomorrow, when we start to swap ideas with other Global Agenda Councils (last year I spent an enjoyable hour talking about nanotechnology with the Council on Faith – not what I set out to do, but it’s these chance encounters that bring considerable added value to the Summit).  Today was more of a consolidation exercise – getting to grips with the areas that the Emerging Technologies Council will be focusing on over the next 12 months.

In our discussions, one topic came up that intrigued me – to the point that I made the mistake of suggesting I might follow up on it.  In talking about the role of technology innovation in society, we got onto the question of how technology innovation can enable social innovation.  As I suspect I will be expected to report back on this at some point, I thought I would start feeling out one or two ideas in today’s blog from the Summit.

The role of technology innovation in social innovation undoubtedly has a rich literature (although a quick Google search doesn’t reveal that much) – one which, I must confess, is beyond my reach sitting here at the end of a long, jet-lagged day.  But I do want to get a few thoughts down for further exploration regardless.

Much of the science and technology policy in the developed world is hooked on the idea of the technology fix: Got a problem – technology innovation can solve it.  I must confess, the idea (in a rather more sophisticated form) influences a lot of my thinking.  But this isn’t the only way of viewing the world.  There are those who argue that addressing some challenges will depend on social – not technological – innovation.  Advocating for lower energy use over better energy sources is one example.  Pushing for practices that reduce carbon dioxide emissions rather than relying on climate engineering to “fix” global warming is another.

Challenges like energy generation, access to clean water, hunger and poverty are often held up as problems requiring technology-based solutions.  But they are also challenges that can be addressed – in part at least – through social innovation.  In fact, the argument that long-term solutions will depend on social change  in these areas is a pretty compelling one.

But this begs the question – can technology innovation be used to enable social innovation that leads to change?

Looking back over history, the answer seems to be yes.  The agricultural revolution enabled profound social changes, allowing stable communities to develop and freeing people to think about more than simply where the next mouthful of food was coming from.  The scientific revolution of the enlightenment transformed people’s understanding of the world and their place in it, and changed society as a result.  The industrial revolution laid the groundwork for today’s affluent first-world societies.

Of course, it can be argued that these technological innovations merely drove social change, rather than enabling social innovation, although I suspect the line between the two is more than a little blurred. But recent history seems to throw up numerous specific examples of technology innovation enabling social innovation – mobile phones connecting communities and providing access to expertise, low power LED lighting supporting increased literacy in developing economies, and social media building virtual communities that transcend geographical and political boundaries for example.

These and other examples suggest that, even when social innovation is important to addressing key challenges, emerging technologies can have a significant role to play in supporting it – technology innovation becomes an enabler of solutions, rather than a solution in and of itself.

But if this is the case, it makes sense to work out how best to use technology in this way, rather than leaving things to chance.

So these are the question that today’s discussions have lodged in my mind:  How can technology innovation be nurtured to provide tools that enable social innovation?  What are the key areas in which technology innovation has the potential to empower social innovation?  And how is the technology fix best balanced against the technology-enabled fix?

I see I’m going to have a restless night!