The Good Database
A database of innovation building blocks to serve as inspiration engine for social impact projects.
In collaboration with Johannes Mutter, Alexander Davies and Jeffrey Pickett, and Fridays for Innovation
Why is it so difficult to find innovation projects?
During our Masters degree at Royal College of Art and Imperial College London, we worked on these ambitious, big, fuzzy projects, all with one key motivation: We wanted to create some kind of positive social change. However, in a few months you can only create so much - and, in the end, we spent most of our time researching only to find another very similar project once we had finally made our design decision. So why didn’t we find these projects right away? As many innovations start out small and only a few make it to a global scale, we might not know of them to begin with. Furthermore, as innovation can virtually be created in any field, you cannot simply google ‘all cool innovation projects out there’.
So we set up a database, not only to browse innovation projects, but to provide similarly minded designers and innovators with inspiration and tools to create their own solutions.
Breaking innovation projects down into their building blocks
What are innovative projects made of? New tech? Sometimes. A creative process? Sure. Inspiring innovators? Yes. A novel insight? Yup. The right question to begin with? Maybe. All innovation projects are successful due to a combination of some of these, and possibly more building blocks. But what’s even more intruiging is that any new combination of these blocks might be the base for a new innovation.
Image by Johannes Mutter
The Good Database as a fuel for social impact projects
With the database as a starting point Fridays for Innovation had a solid foundation to run weekly impact sprints and therefore create the chance for many aspiring innovators to come up, play with and create innovative projects around the SDG’s, and, therefore laying a new foundation for sustainable impact.
