Social Innovation
Social Innovation for employers and organisations
Why SIPC is a credible signal when hiring or upskilling — and how to verify a candidate's certification or bring the framework to your team.
Verify a credential
If a candidate or employee claims SIPC certification, you can confirm it directly through certN’s public verification service.
Why this matters
Organisations working on social impact — NGOs, foundations, public agencies, corporate sustainability teams, social enterprises — increasingly need staff who can apply structured innovation methodology to real social challenges.
The Social Innovation framework provides that methodology. The SIPC certification provides a credible way to identify practitioners who can apply it.
What an SIPC-certified person can do
An SIPC holder has demonstrated competence to:
- Analyse a social challenge using structured tools, not just intuition
- Translate complex situations into well-formed innovation problems
- Generate, evaluate, and select solution alternatives systematically
- Design and test prototypes against clear success criteria
- Evaluate impact and monitor performance over time
- Operate across the full innovation cycle, from initial framing to scaled delivery
The certification covers the skills, not just the vocabulary. The exam is open-book and competence-based for a reason — recall alone doesn’t prove practice.
Why SIPC is a credible credential
ADP develops the standard and accredits trainers but does not deliver training or administer exams. The exam is run by certN, an independent examination institute. This separation prevents the obvious conflicts of interest that compromise some certifications.
The Social Innovation Manual — the complete reference for the certification — is published under CC BY 4.0. Anyone can read it, scrutinise it, and judge whether it’s serious work. There is no secret curriculum.
The exam itself is competence-based: it uses applied scenarios, not definitional recall, with about 80% of questions application-based. The credential is valid for life, with no renewal fee or continuing-education requirement.
Training your team
Three ways to bring the framework into your organisation.
Send team members to public training delivered by ADP-accredited trainers worldwide. The directory lets you filter by location, language, and format. Find a trainer →
Bring a trainer in-house. Most accredited trainers deliver custom programmes for organisations; contact them directly through their profile in the directory.
Or accredit one of your own trainers, if your organisation has internal training capacity. This makes sense for larger organisations training cohorts regularly. Become an accredited trainer →
Common questions about credential recognition, verification, and team training are answered in the FAQ.