iValues
Idea, Innovation, and Impact
Through the iValues Awards, we seek to transform values into actions and projects that will help improve politics and policy making in the MENA region.
We dissected politics into two main categories: politics as practice and politics as a theory. Through different formats, we created a space to discuss the impact of innovation on our day-to-day interaction with policies and politics and to explore the potential of new methodologies in shaping our behavior towards societal, historical and cultural trends.
Here’s How our Country Scouts and Citizen Jurors in Morocco & Algeria and Israel Define Political Innovation!
Salah-Eddine El Badaoui, Morocco & Algeria
The core of the MENA problems is political, and politics, as everyone knows, is about ideas and projects/programs that concern the homeland and the citizen. Today, we see stagnation in the political movement and a complete absence of solutions to problems. Our political situation is characterized by poverty and a clear lack of political creativity.
Political innovation requires much more than the mere expression of new ideas. It is also necessary to implement these ideas because new ideas turn into innovation when they are implemented, and this transformation of an idea into a creation is part of the creative process.
Political innovation requires much more than the mere expression of new ideas.
Arik Segal, Israel
Political innovation should find solutions to challenges that are created by political decisions. Since political decisions are sometimes based on electoral considerations, they might harm some groups, or individuals in society. Here comes the role and responsibility of entrepreneurs to find those issues and unmet needs and offer solutions.
Political innovation will usually face not only structural challenges, but also political and social objections by some, since it touches upon sensitive issues that stem in social identities.
Moreover, it will only be useful and effective if it will do so and not ignore the sensitivities involved. The highest level and most effective political innovations will address political and social processes directly and offer new paths and methods instead of existing ones. I do believe that political innovation is the most challenging type of innovation, since for it to work it must include the exact balance of politics, society, and economics, put together in a profitable and sustainable project.
Political innovation should find solutions to challenges that are created by political decisions.