Game Changers: The Big Green Challenge and the Role of Challenge Grants in Social Innovation

Abstract

Abstract A key challenge for governments faced with increasingly limited financial resources lies in finding new ways of partnering with the not-for-profit sector to deliver innovative solutions to intractable social problems. This allows government to tap into previously inaccessible resources contained in local communities, and to harness them to produce social goods. However, it also requires that government take on a new role as a facilitator of social innovation rather than a direct actor, which poses a challenge for both theorists and practitioners. This paper is based on a qualitative investigation of the Big Green Challenge, a competition designed to stimulate community groups to generate programs to tackle climate change in their localities. It examines the role that similar challenge grants and competitions might play in stimulating social innovation and asks questions about how government can help innovations to scale up and out.