Impact Metrics for Social Innovation: Barriers or Bridges to Radical Change?

Addressing society's complex problems means fundamentally challenging systems and their economic, social and environmental dimensions. Current measurement tools and evaluation approaches are grounded in conventional accounting practices, and thus tend to a focus on the outcomes of products and services, mainly evaluating economic performance. This presents a particular challenge when it comes to evaluating the impacts of social innovation, which have intended effects beyond economic and financial. This paper describes conventional measurement tools and their limitations for evaluating social impact, and proposes that developmental evaluation is more suited to evaluating social innovation. The consequences of not developing new metrics for social innovation are discussed in terms of the disadvantages for decision-making.