23 February 2017, Thailand

The innovation landscape in Thailand is rapidly growing with government, private sectors, and non-profit organization all working to promote innovation. However, social innovation is an aspect of innovation that has received less attention.

To address this deficit, UNDP in Thailand launched the Thailand for Social Innovation for Development Facility (TSI4D). Over the past few months, UNDP has engaged a diverse consortium of partners in the social innovation space, including government agencies, private sector firms, non-profit organizations and academic institutions, to be part of a new Social Innovation Facility for Development (TSI4D).

The essential goal of the facility is to promote, unify, and coordinate all the different social innovation initiatives taking place across the country. In addition to promoting social innovation and impact, the initiative aims to increase the capacity of youth in Thailand to create social enterprise start-ups, and connect promising initiatives to a funding/investment platform so they can scale up.

UNDP organized a Co-creation Workshop with the Partnership Consortium for TSI4D held on 23 February 2017 at the UN office in Bangkok to bring together all the partners to co-design the social innovation facility. The workshop focused on two main topics: understanding the gaps, underlying needs, and key insights and idea generation and possibilities to develop the facility (based on ideas from the workshop)

The Asian Institute of Technology (AIT) was one the institutions invited to participate in this initiative as it actively promoting collaborative innovation among its students. AIT will formally launch its own Innovation Lab [ilab], a creativity center with state-of-the-art equipment and gadgets that connects entrepreneurs, mentors, industry experts with talented regional students & researchers advance innovation & develop collaborative solutions for social & technological development

Mr. Martin Hart-Hansen, Deputy Resident Representative, UNDP Thailand introduced the Social Innovation Workshop