Social Innovation for Sustainability Challenges

Petteri Repo,Kaisa Matschoss

doi:10.3390/su12010319

Petteri Repo, Kaisa Matschoss

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/su12010319

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Abstract

Social innovation is concerned with social mobilization and impact, and is increasingly seen as an option to address sustainability challenges. Nevertheless, the concept of social innovation is quite open in character and requires empirical accommodation to establish how it differs from other types of innovation in this setting. This article contributes empirically to the concept of social innovation as it reviews categories of success factors of social innovation against those of five other innovation types (product, service, governmental, organizational, system) in 202 innovation cases that focus on climate action, environment, resource efficiency and raw materials. Statistical analysis with contingency tables is applied to examine the distribution of five kinds of success factors across the innovation types: economic, environmental, political, social, and technological. The results confirm empirically that social innovation is indeed a distinct type of innovation. There are statistically significant differences in the distribution of categories of success factors between social innovation on the one hand and product, service and governance innovation on the other. In addition to the prevalence of social success factors, social innovation is characterized by a lesser emphasis on political and technological success factors.

Highlights

Social innovation remains an underdeveloped and to some extent contested concept [1,2]
A contingency-table analysis of the success factors shows that statistically significant differences can be observed between the distribution of kinds of success factors across different types of innovations
The main contribution of the article is that it empirically accommodates the conceptualisation of social innovation in a way that reaches beyond the examination of small numbers of case studies and thereby produces new knowledge at a more general level

Summary

Introduction

Social innovation remains an underdeveloped and to some extent contested concept [1,2]. Many social innovations have targeted sustainability challenges such as the prevention and impacts of climate change. Pressing questions relate to concerns on how to reorganize cities, transport systems, and housing to reach dramatic reductions in carbon dioxide emissions, which all constitute sustainability challenges that can be addressed in a variety of ways [14]. These all represent examples of expected impacts for social innovation, which other types of innovation may contribute to, but are usually not expected to address by themselves. The kind of economic progress sought for in social innovation differs and, for instance, relates more directly to abolishing poverty rather than seeking economic growth towards the same aim [15]

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