5 Questions for the Social Competitiveness Index

Countries famously compare different statistics to understand how they stack up against one another in their economic capacity. A new initiative being pushed by the authors of "Philanthrocapitalism" Matthew Bishop and Michael Green is meant to help countries understand how they compare in their capacity to create social value.

The "Social Competitiveness Index" project was born under the auspices of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Philanthropy and Social Investment, and is working with folks like "Blended Value" author Jed Emerson and the Avina Foundation to make the idea a reality.

The project was inspired by the World Economic Forum's Global Competitiveness Report, which focuses not on indicators of current economic strength but on understanding how current assets and practices will shape future opportunities. Similarly, the Social Competitiveness Index (SCI) would be looking for indications not just of who is the most innovative now, but who is creating the institutions and norms most likely to produce social innovation moving forward.

• The group working on the project is working off of the hypothesis that the elements they need to track include three necessary capacities of government, private institutions, and nonprofits:
• To create new technologies or models for enabling social change: requiring innovation, a protective legal framework, and an ability to test ideas
• An ability to test ideas (and filter the bad): vibrancy in terms of assessment approaches, academic knowledge creation, and open government data
• Funding to scale ideas that work

They're at the very beginning stages and asking for feedback. Here are the first few questions that jump out at me, and I'd love for readers to contribute any more they might have:

1. Who Cares? I mean this not in a jerky "gotcha" way, but literally: who is this aimed at? Is it policy makers? Business leaders? Nonprofit leaders? Can it realistically be aimed at everyone at once?

2. Is the ability for sectors to work together implicit in the metrics above, or does that need to be tracked in its own right? Scaling solutions obviously requires all of the actors mentioned above to work together, but that is easier said than done. Is there a way to measure how effectively these different groups collaborate?

3. Does there need to be a specific section of analysis devoted to non-institutional actors? There is an implicit assumption that social competitiveness is the domain of (or at least led by) traditional institutional actors, but that gets murky in a wired, connected world. It may make sense to look at the capacity that citizens in a country have to shift the political agenda or self-organize for good in the absence of institutional leadership.

4. What is the behavior it presumes to change? This is one of the big ones for me. One the one hand, I know that good information can shift behavior when people discover that what they believe themselves to be doing is not actually the reality. But that requires existing intent, and I wonder what specific sorts of behavior shifts the group behind this is looking to inspire? More infrastructure investment from the government? Deeper metrics from nonprofits?

5. Is competitiveness the right framework? The "competition" framework works for the Global Competitiveness Report because in many parts of our economic lives, countries are competing with each other for resources, leadership and talent. I'm not one to shy away from the importance of competition, and in fact, have a more hostile attitude towards collaboration than many in our space.

Still, I'm not sure that it's the right framework to compare nation's to each other in terms of their capacity to create change. I do think that there is some value in showing how behind some global standard a specific country is in terms of some aspect of what the SCI folks want to measure, but overall, the big ticket items in the social change space are so interrelated that competition can't be the framework - at least not the only one.

This is just one of the interesting problems that the folks behind the SCI will have to figure out. I'm glad they're taking a stab at it, though. Information is power, and the more power we have to change the way we change the world, the better.

Photo credit: World Economic Forum