The topic of September edition of Bilgi Cagi Magazine is ‘social innovation’. Social innovation generally implies to the new ideas, strategies and changes that serve the benefit of the society and aim to strengthen civil society. The magazine is yet again providing an issue with articles and interviews with the distinguished people who contribute to the development of social innovation in a way, or have a conceptual approach to social innovation.
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innovation concept is presented in different ways by the magazine authors and the experts interviewed. Tara Hopkins, the responsible of Social Responsibility Course Programme in Sabancı University emphasizes the need to establish a social contribution understanding on the university students in order to make them more responsive to their environment. Şirin Elçi, emphasized the transition from social responsibility concept to social innovation in companies to cooperate with society for sustainable development. The social innovation, according to Elçi, has a wide range application area from political decisions to increase employment and regional development to e-government services.
Leyla Arsan, TAGES CEO, stresses that sole R&D or creativeness is not enough for innovation; in order to be socially innovative you should first discover yourself and then your environment. She continues that right conditions should be established for social innovation. Therefore, she proposes that social sciences should be regarded within the R&D scope, projects should be made to develop civil society leaders, national social innovation policies should be established, policies should be developed to benefit from national and international funding in an effective and cooperative way including the social entrepreneur leaders, systems should be built to let each individual discover himself and his environment.
Cemil Arıkan and Selçuk Karaata from Nation Innovation Initiative emphasize the importance of social entrepreneurship in social innovation. As they stress social entrepreneurship paves the way for economical development, development of innovation and new services and products, improvement of equality in the society and social capital developed beyond the financial capital.
Bilgi Cagi magazine includes different stories of the social entrepreneurs such as İbrahim Betil, the founder and head of ‘Community Volunteers’ and Yusuf Kulca, head of ‘Hope Children’s Association’.
TAGES is one of the main contributors in Bilgi Cagi magazine which is published monthly with a vision to watch R&D and innovation processes of Turkey where the target mass is public organisations, NGOs, private sector, universities and all parties responsible for the R&D and innovation improvement of Turkey.
To read more on ‘Social Innovation’ you may look at Bilgi Cagi Magazine:
www.bilgicagi.com
