The Future is Collective: Advancing Collective Social Innovation to Address Society’s Biggest Challenges

Today’s most pressing challenges – rising inequality, environmental crises and social fragmentation – are too complex for any single organization to solve alone. Collective social innovation offers a new way forward, bringing together diverse stakeholders to create systemic change.

This report, The Future is Collective: Advancing Collective Social Innovation to Address Society’s Biggest Challenges, developed by the Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship in collaboration with its community of collective social innovators, explores how social innovation can unite diverse stakeholders for large-scale social change. It highlights the values, strategies and organizing models that enable multistakeholder collaborations to thrive. Through global case studies – explored in greater depth in the companion report, The Future is Collective: Case Studies of Collective Social Innovation – this report showcases how collective social innovators are shaping new governance models, aggregating resources, and developing vast datasets to support decision-making and policy-making.

By facilitating collaboration, aligning funding strategies and amplifying grassroots leadership, collective social innovation has the potential to accelerate progress towards a more just, inclusive and sustainable world. This report is a call to action for funders, policy-makers and changemakers to harness the power of collective action for lasting social impact.