Dear sir,

Thank you for asking me and giving an opportunity to answer your question.

How can a communication student can adopt social innovation as a subject of thesis?

A communication student can have following research in social innovation:

• Visit the underprivileged surroundings nearby you. Find out an illiteracy status in terms of financial illiteracy, lack of soft skills, unawareness about the digitalization, communication gap, etc. of these people and identify remedial initiatives for such people to be taken by government, local governing bodies etc. you can meet around 600 respondents from this area and discover the problems and issues of these people and accordingly set the objectives and need of study. Recommend the outcomes and findings to the government.

The only way is to understand societal concerns and participate in solving them. Social innovations in communication can be a starting point. One needs to develop empathy with the people to whom such concerns are important.

Regards and best wishes

In 2007, Geoff Mulgan et al. identified entry points for action in the report Social Innovation: What It Is, Why It Matters and How It Can Be Accelerated. (Their catalog of requirements for success featured leadership and structures suited for innovation; finance focused on innovation; policy frameworks that encourage innovation; dedicated social innovation accelerators; national and cross-national innovation pools; and research to enhance learning. Additional items might relate to education in, say, participatory techniques and specific training; citizen involvement and buy-in; systems of cooperation between business actors, local public entities, civil society and nongovernmental organizations; the recording of good practice from model cases; and new forms of evaluation that give greater attention to social impacts.)

To begin with, however, and this is where a background in organizational communication might come handy, it would be a good thing to agree on a common definition of social innovation: a wide variety of activities falls under the label—more democratic, inclusive and less linear ways of doing research, new strategies for class management in schools and new forms of communication in political processes—and contributes to fuzziness. Focusing and narrowing down on underlying variety is imperative if one is to efficiently support related practices and facilitate their measurement.

Article Sparking Social Innovations

Article Social Innovation: Dead Slow Ahead?