Promoting social innovation

Social engineering in its more coercive form may be an attempt by individuals, groups or governments to assert their respective ideologies upon society, and plan society and desirable social change by the management of people in accordance with their place and function, or lack of it, in society. Social engineering can also take many other forms, however subtle, such as genetic engineering, test-tube babies, and population control (such as the one baby per family rule imposed on Chinese couples).

Extremism tends to facilitate social engineering, though this is by no means exclusive. History's most vivid example of social engineering was fascist Nazi Germany's final solution, essentially the total eradication of Jews by organized mass murder or genocide. More recently, fascist "ethnic cleansing" has been used as a doctrine in ex-Yugoslavia to purify regions from other ethnic groups by murder and terror. Another stark example of mass-scale social engineering was the communist former Soviet Union whose vast empire of many countries or regions was conquered and held together by communist rule from Moscow. Their communist doctrine was based on Marxism-Leninism, which supports a totalitarian government in which a single party controls state-owned means of production with the aim of establishing a classless society. Other political forms, religion, individual enterprise, innovation and private ownership were not included or tolerated in this society.

2. In the fields of medical research or electronics or chemistry, governments recognize the need for, and give support to, research laboratories. But the equivalent resources for research and experimentation are not put into helping resolve social problems such as poverty, unemployment, inter-racial conflict, drug additions, crime, mental illness, labour disputes, poor education and family breakdown. Part of the difficulty that social scientists are wary of creating social inventions, preferring a passive and analytical role. Another flaw is that government agencies do not share the business world's seductive approach and its love for the new.