The future of social R&D in Australia: In conversation with Chris Vanstone

In early 2023, the for-purpose sector came together for a symposium to explore the future of Social R&D. We sat down with TACSI’s Chris Vanstone to get a glimpse behind the scenes and what he took away from the session.


5 April 2023

The TACSI Team

Let’s set the scene. What was the intention behind the event?

Chris Vanstone: “In 2019, we brought together a small number of partners across the for-purpose sector to explore the potential of social R&D ecosystems in Australia. This led to us collectively publishing a social R&D white paper, which describes what R&D is, how we could make the best use of it, and how we could adopt and adapt it for the social purpose sector in Australia. 

Co-hosted by RMIT and The Australian Centre for Social Innovation, the event posed the question of what the future could look like with an active Social R & D system fit for Australia’s complex social issues. 

This has been the first time we’ve been able to get people from across the for-purpose sector, including philanthropy, government, not-for-profit, intermediaries and universities together in one place to really explore the idea of Social R&D. 

We were joined by Sir Geoff Mulgan, who’s leading conversations about social R&D globally and Jason Pearman, who is now leading social R&D activities from within the Canadian government.”

How would you define social R&D?

CV: “Defining what social R&D actually means for Australia is part of the work we’re looking to do, and we will need to think about it at several levels. 

It’s about developing a social R&D workforce; it’s about supporting an innovation pathway from ideas to implementation; it’s about coordinating innovation activities and creating a set of incentives that sit around all of that; and it’s about making social R&D something people want to do.

In Australia, we don’t have staged processes of developing new knowledge in the for-purpose space in the same way that we do in the pharmaceutical, agricultural, technology or defence industries, for example.”

Who spoke at the event, and what did they talk about?

CV: “Our first keynote was Geoff Mulgan, who shared insights from his new book, Another World Is Possible: How to Reignite Social and Political Imagination. He talked about how the alternative to a good social R&D process is trying out half-formed ideas on the whole population all at once. This, of course, is what happens all the time in government, but this can be incredibly risky from a wellbeing, financial and reputational perspective. 

Geoff also spoke about how many of the conditions for social R&D are in place in Australia right now. Some of these include a strong not-for-profit sector, a strong university sector and governments who are looking to make progress on wellbeing. 

Our other keynote was Jason Pearman, who spoke about his experience building an R&D ecosystem around youth services in Canada and demonstrated how the government can go a long way to creating the conditions for social R&D through thoughtful commissioning.

His team is doing some incredibly interesting things, such as using relatively small amounts of money to bring providers and thinkers together for thought experiments. He did this around a “no wrong door” approach to youth services that ultimately led to an entirely different approach being taken from what was originally planned

Another example he gave was about encouraging collaboration between would-be competitors in the social sector by funding a consortias of service providers and innovation agencies to create new models that were disseminated across the sector. This helps to create a new benchmark for quality whilst building the capacity of R&D in the sector. 

In the afternoon we heard about two practical examples of Social R&D from Australia.  Nithya Solomon talked about the work of RMIT’s Health Transformation Lab, a commercially funded venture exploring new kinds of health care. TACSI’s Principal of Social Health Carla Clarence alongside Aguang Daw, Jo Sehee and Mel Legge discussed their work developing a Future Wellness Accelerator, a proposal for a new kind of public infrastructure to accelerate the development of in-community responses to mental health.”

What has left you feeling excited after this session? 

CV: “There was a real cross section of social purpose organisations at the event – funders, intermediaries, government, NGOs – and I think this was an agenda that everyone could connect to from their different perspectives. They could all see how the challenges they face in their own work would be in some way addressed if we had a social R&D ecosystem. 

For example, a not-for-profit struggling to fund innovation work, an intermediary looking to form partnerships, a department implementing a government reform without being able to build capability or impact investors realising that money only went to well developed latter-stage innovation projects rather than early stage innovation.”

What were some of the outcomes of the discussions and what’s next? 

CV: “I think the event has given the partners behind the paper more confidence and energy to pursue the agenda, and we’ve had some great feedback on the event. 

Right now we’re working on developing a strategy that builds on everything that was shared/ We recognise that we need to continue to build awareness of social R&D amongst practitioners and amongst funders and policy makers but we also need to find some concrete opportunities to demonstrate it within a system that sees the value in this way of working. For example, in the same way that it’s been embraced by youth services in Canada.”

Interested in learning more? We’re hosting a webinar on The Future of Social R&D in Australia on May 3 from 11am-12pm AEST

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