In Finland, during the European Social Fund Plus programming period, the funding share for Social innovations is directed towards reforming child protection through the Safety nets for young people's futures programme. Development in line with social innovations is a funding condition for both the regional projects and the coordination activities.
In the Safety nets for young people's futures programme, social innovations are defined as follows:
- They are societal in their objectives, social in their means, and broadly related to the everyday lives of children, young people, and families.
- They are new, functional ideas through which solutions are found to society’s needs and problems.
- They produce a positive impact for the common good, and their implementation creates new forms of interaction.
Social innovations refer to new ways of working, practices or operating models developed and implemented by child protection professionals and other actors that wholly or partially reform child protection together with service users. The definition is aligned with the innovation definitions used by the European Union (The Young Foundation 2012) and Demos Helsinki (2022).
Systemic change
Murray, Gaulier‑Grice and Mulgan (2010), as well as the innovation model by Geels and Schot (2007), link social innovations to systemic change, the aim of which is to transform the entire service system. System‑level change means a change in policy and organisational structures, consisting of clusters of multiple small innovations.
Systemic change arises as long‑term change in the public and private sectors. Breaking down existing ways of operating requires pressure for change in the operating environment as well as clusters of simultaneous innovative actions aimed at a new operating culture. In the field of social innovations, the focus is not, for example, on regulatory or structural changes, but on negotiating new shared meanings and on experimenting with and institutionalising the ideas that emerge from them (Geels & Schot, 2007, 414–416).
Social innovations are developed in stages
The Open Book of Social Innovation (2010) and the recent Social Innovation Handbook (Yhteiskunnallisten innovaatioiden käsikirja, Ala‑Kauhaluoma et al. 2025) present the spiral‑shaped social innovation process adopted by the SOILA coordination project and applied to support programme implementation, and its six development stages from defining the need for innovation through experimentation, institutionalisation and scaling towards systemic change.
Specific characteristics of social innovations
In reforming child protection, attention is paid to how and with whom the reform is carried out. In the Safety Nets for Young People’s Futures projects, 16 specific characteristics of social innovations corresponding to the Young Foundation (2012) definition are used as tools for analysing social innovation ideas in child protection.
According to the review Social Innovations in Child Protection published in 2024 (Jäppinen et al. 2024), attachment to ecosystems was identified as the least well‑described characteristic of innovations in Finnish child protection development.
The innovation model
The OECD Innovation Model (2018) can be used to support and assess the systematic use of innovations in the public sector. Innovation activities can be used, for example, to promote the achievement of policy objectives.
In the OECD Innovation Model, innovations are classified according to two characteristics:
- The degree of radical change pursued through the innovation process
Enhancement‑oriented innovations focus on improving existing practices.
Anticipatory radical innovations anticipate new and different opportunities. The degree to which innovation activity is managed
Mission‑oriented innovations increase systemic impact (top‑down led).
Adaptive innovations adapt to new circumstances (bottom‑up led).