Factors of Social Innovation Revisited: Literature Review And A Research Model Proposal

Abstract

The agenda of social sciences research has always included social innovation (SI) due to the rapid increase in the social problems and their expanded impacts as a result of climate crisis, political conflicts and disequilibrium in the political economy in both national and global levels. In recent years, researchers of SI struggled to provide frameworks for evaluating and measuring social impacts-of not only social innovation and entrepreneurship practices but also all corporate social responsibility projects and human development projects as a tool for ensuring the return on investment in terms of benefits, hence for providing the continuity of social investments. However, though the social impact analysis research has contributed to better interpret the validity of Social investments to the investors, there is still room for research on elaboration of drivers/success factors of social innovation activities to provide a framework for ensuring the outcomes of the social innovation efforts. For contributing the body of knowledge on the dimensions of drivers of social innovation, this study aims to present a framework of factors of social innovation derived from content analysis on literature, and to propose a research model on drivers and process components of social innovation practices for future studies. Findings revealed that the drivers of social innovation can be clustered as actors, resources, objectives and the process attributes where the innovativeness dimension is embedded in. Actors dimension presented highest numbers of sub dimensions. The social innovation research should utilize the theories of management, organization discipline.