Social innovation: Integrating product and user innovation

Abstract

The paper introduces a conceptual approach explaining how end users, user communities and /or for-profit firms provide benefits to society through new product or service development. We show that innovation may occur in different economic environments including non-market ones as well as that social innovation will not occur on its own in a purely producer for-profit environment. To explain such cases, we suggest integrating product and user innovation paradigms into the Producer-User Social Innovation (PUSI) Model that demonstrates how infrastructure and enabling technology is provided either by producer or user to introduce new market product or service. To provide face validity and illustrate the versatility of the proposed approach we consider five very different cases. These illustrative examples allowed to provide evidence that user-driven innovation is socially oriented in its nature as it implicitly addresses community or societal needs. In addition to providing insights into the nature of social innovation, the model can be utilized to help understand why social innovation may fail and how to increase the likelihood of success by engaging with appropriate for-profit producers, communities, and users. Implications to policy and practice are provided, including the opportunity for government to encourage social innovation directly and indirectly.