Abstract
Nowadays, innovation is no longer a peculiarity of developed economies. Indeed, more frequently, it occurs that innovations born in the so called "emerging countries" spread in the advanced ones. This phenomenon is well known as Reverse innovation (RI), and within the global innovation literature about RI, some authors refer to these reversed innovations as developed in order to solve social or economic issues, specific of emerging contexts. However, scholars use to connect innovation with social goal as primary benefit to another phenomenon: i.e., Social innovation (SI). Within the Social innovation literature, there is a lack concerning how it should be undertaken to spread globally. Thus, we applied the Reverse innovation process to Social innovations: through a case-study analysis, we link the two phenomena which have never been explored together in previous studies. The paper aims at understanding how Social innovations spread from emerging to more advanced markets, while implementing this inversion of the flow. Further, we want to explore which is the potential that a Social innovation has in the host market: in other words, if SI could lose, hold, reduce, or increase their original social connotation.
Highlights
The recent pandemic era, caused by the spread of Covid-19, challenged people, economies, and the global health
South Korea learned the lesson of Mers (Han et al, 2020) and was able to perform around 15.000–20.000 detection tests per day, working closely to the private sector: they know better how to deal with these plagues
We want to understand whether Social innovations, once expanded from home to the host market, potentially lose, hold, reduce, or increase their original social connotation. In line with these goals, in this work we propose a case-study concerning a Social innovation coming from the South Korea, and further spreads in other countries: the “Drive-through” testing center, later become the “Walk-through” screening center, two innovative solutions, which enable monitoring the number of new cases and detect a huge amount of people per day
Summary
The recent pandemic era, caused by the spread of Covid-19, challenged people, economies, and the global health. Italian Journal of Marketing high innovative potential (i.e., South Korea) handled the pandemic better than the “advanced countries” (U.S and United Kingdom), registering less Covid-19 deaths. These data (Fig. 1) have been collected through the platform “Our world in data” (OWID), an online database which includes data on confirmed cases, deaths, and tests performed. This result is due to different reasons, which might be considered. Nowadays, emerging countries are developing their own innovative skills and capabilities, building their specific innovations
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