Social and Institutional Innovations in Family Forestry

Abstract

Over the last decade, the term social innovation has received increasing attention as a means to address complex global social problems and to add collective values. In earlier innovation research, the term “institutional innovation” was introduced to denote institutional efforts and the role of institutions in successful innovations. We detect overlaps between the two perspectives when it comes to innovation in family forestry. Overall, the forest sector has many potentials for fostering rural and community development and thus appears to be a promising field to adopt modes of social innovation in terms of collaborative competences in the co-creation of services and goods. Inherently, from a service dominant logic (S-D) perspective, dynamic capabilities of customer orientation, co-creation of needs and mutual exchange of knowledge can have substantial impact on the innovation outcomes in family forestry. The chapter examines collective action and collective benefits in forestry behind the background of concepts of social and institutional innovation. With innovative examples from forestry across Europe we show how both private and public-private collaborative efforts lead to successful innovation and we discuss the relevance of key service-logic aspects of social innovation to family forestry.