We believe that in-country capacity to stimulate, support and scale social innovation is absolutely critical to ensure sustainability of effort and outcome. Therefore, capacity strengthening is a primary focus area of the Social Innovation in Health Initiative.

From 2 to 3 November, 16 participants from different backgrounds will meet in Cape Town to explore the various mechanisms of capacity strengthening that could be applied. These experts are experienced in different fields. From general global health to global health research, in particular social innovation. But they have one thing in common: they have working knowledge of capacity strengthening mechanisms applied at various levels. These include individual, institutional and system levels.

At the meeting, capacity strengthening will be a focus point. It plays an important role at various stages of the social innovation process – from its creation to its development stage and integration into the health system, where dissemination starts.

A key aspect of social innovation is the partnership between community members, NGOs, public health systems and the private sector. In fact, it is crucial to the success of social innovation. Therefore, strengthening in-country capacity to bring all these actors together – to discuss and identify new ways to bridge the delivery gap – will also be discussed at the meeting.

This discussion will be continued at the Evidence-based Consultation on Social Innovation in Health – a meeting of key like minded actors, taking place in Annecy and Geneva from 2 to 4 December. The aim of this convening is to promote social innovation in healthcare delivery, but also to shape the research and capacity-strengthening agenda. Through this, we hope to learn more about the mechanisms of capacity strengthening. We look forward to building upon existing knowledge and experience to further shape our vision.

Every few years, a new buzzword or phrase seems to parachute from nowhere and virally spread across countries and continents, becoming a hot topic for exploration and discussion.

For the last five years, ‘innovation’ and ‘entrepreneurship’ have dominated the business lexicon, no doubt spurred by the success of web-based innovators and entrepreneurs primarily based in Silicon Valley. Since then, ‘innovation’ and ‘entrepreneurship’ have been the focus of thousands of newspaper articles, academic theses, books and media programmes, not to mention the global movement to create institutions and centres dedicated to the subject.

The Skoll Centre, established in 2003 and based at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, was one of the first adherents among academic institutions (outside of the USA) to wholly support innovation and entrepreneurial endeavour dedicated to addressing social and environmental challenges. For the last 11 years, the Centre has provided full MBA scholarships to proven entrepreneurs who have realised that the impact of their organisations could be enhanced with a greater understanding of the elements of business concepts and practices.

Today, there are 60 Skoll Scholar alums all over the world who continue to apply market-based solutions to a myriad of social, environmental and economic problems. Reflecting the accelerated interest in innovation and entrepreneurship among students from non-business disciplines, the Skoll Centre has dramatically widened its engagement with students across the University, offering a rich range of opportunities to inspire and engage them in entrepreneurial approaches, wherever their career paths take them. The Centre also supports those who wish to launch and grow their own ventures.

The Skoll Centre has been a pioneer in promoting actionable insight through supporting research that contributes to innovation and entrepreneurial thinking and practice. It has engaged faculty – teaching mainstream business courses in finance, accounting, operations and marketing to integrate relevant concepts and practices drawn from entrepreneurial approaches and/or the approaches being pursued by their growing intermediary organisations. It also works across the University, supporting faculty in other disciplines to undertake research that contributes to innovation and entrepreneurial thinking and practice.

The Skoll Centre is very proud of its achievements in talent development and research promotion. Globally, the Centre is most recognised for catalysing deep exchanges with a global community of innovators through targeted annual convenings. The Skoll World Forum is best known and, since 2010, the event has drawn over 1 000 participants from all over the world.

What are some of the lessons we have learned over the past eleven years? There are many, but I will focus on one particular lesson that is relevant to the Social Innovation in Health Initiative (SIHI) currently spearheaded by the Skoll Centre, in partnership with the Bertha Centre for Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship at the University of Cape Town’s Graduate School of Business, and with the support of the World Health Organization.

Spurred by the global hype over innovation and entrepreneurship, and coupled with people’s aspirations to find a greater purpose to which they can dedicate their time and talent, it seems everyone wants to be an entrepreneur focused on social and financial wealth creation. The current and growing wave of accelerators, incubators and social venture competitions – combined with people’s interest in solving the problems of the world – have created the impression that all you need are passion and a respectable business plan to become a successful entrepreneur. Innovative ideas are what happens when you take a shower. They appear miraculously from thin air into your head.

But if you look at what it takes to truly change entrenched, albeit malfunctioning systems and practices in any field, including health, the notion that one can come up with an innovative solution to those challenges in a weekend hackathon defies all common sense and observation.

Successful innovators and entrepreneurs have spent decades designing, implementing and refining demand-driven approaches to complex social and environmental problems. Their achievements have followed a continuous process of trial-and-error in specific contexts. They have learned who are the key stakeholders to involve, the signals to watch for and the pitfalls to avoid. Development organisations and governments would be hard pressed to generate the accumulated knowledge gained through the hands-on experience and long-term commitment involved in the social innovation process.

The key that unlocks the social innovation door is the notion of ‘apprenticing with the problem’. This approach flies in the face of the way entrepreneurial education is currently undertaken. The Skoll Centre’s premise is that one cannot solve a problem one has not lived or knows precious little about – and this is what students are constantly being asked to do. The social innovators identified in the SIHI have long apprenticed with the problem of healthcare delivery. What they are now grappling with is how to scale their solutions.

By encouraging collective action and a systems thinking approach to social change, the Centre is focused on reshaping the conversation about how academic institutions support social innovation and entrepreneurship. Through its Apprenticing with the Problem initiative, we hope to provide inspiration and a framework to help students analyse complex social issues, while inspiring them to build upon existing solutions. Ask any successful social innovator how long this process takes. It is certainly longer than any period spent in an accelerator, incubator or weekend hackathon.