Social innovation prizes spur social innovation, right? Well, sometimes they do, and their winners keep winning. Other times they don’t, and we all wonder, “What was the point of that?” Let’s assess the good, the bad and the ugly… the winners, the losers and the choosers. In 2009, I entered the We Media PitchIt! Challenge – a competition […]
Social innovation prizes: who really wins?
By Czerina Patel
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Inside | Czerina Patel
Czerina Patel is a Cape Town-born journalist who has spent half her life in the US. She has a Masters in Journalism from Columbia University. She also ran Radio Rookies, a youth documentary training programme for WNYC Radio in New York and won several journalism and broadcast awards, including the Peabody Award and the Robert F. Kennedy Award. She’s now the founder and executive director of Yenza (www.yenza.org) an organisation that, among other things, uplifts township teens.
Dump the innovation prizes?
By Inside | Out
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In August 2013, Kevin Starr blogged controversially in the Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) that innovation prizes should be “dumped”, or at least massively reworked. Some of his criticisms: Competitions drain an already resource- deprived sector. They waste masses of time, generating many losers and thousands of lost hours for social change agents. There is […]
Inside | Out is published by The Bertha Centre for Social Innovation & Entrepreneurship, hosted at the Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town, South Africa.
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