Social Innovation Processes Research Articles

Neighborhood Activism in Planning for New York City, 1945-1975

The practice of city planning in New York City was transformed in the decades after World War II. At the start of this period, the system was characterized by little citizen involvement and no transparency. By the mid-1970s, citizens had become accepted participants in land-use decision-making, and formal procedures for involving citizens in planning had been written into local law. This article explores how this turning point in citizen participation came about by focusing on the Cooper Square Committee—an ambitious practitioner of neighborhood activism on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Setting the Committee’s quest in the participatory context of the times uncovers a groundswell of voluntary groups who used the city’s neighborhoods as forums for democratic action. Along with government actors, planning professionals, and civic and social agencies, such groups contributed to the transformation in planning, which developed not by premeditated campaign but by a cumulative process of public problem-solving and social innovation.

MATURE SOCIAL ECONOMY ENTERPRISE AND SOCIAL INNOVATION: THE CASE OF THE DESJARDINS ENVIRONMENTAL FUND

ABSTRACTThis study seeks to understand the nature and process of social innovation driven by mature social economy enterprises, and the innovative capability that supports it. The research examines enterprise capabilities by means of the institutional approach to social innovation and the Resource‐Based View theory (RBV). Based on grounded theory, this research focuses on a single case, the creation of the Desjardins Environment Fund (DEF). Launched 25 years ago,1 DEF is the first mutual fund in North America to include extra‐financial criteria in its evaluation of business environmental management practices (fund securities) for the information of individual investors. The findings of this empirical research show how a major cooperative bank can generate social innovation and how this entails organizational innovations. The findings also reveal how these innovations benefit from the strategic and process resources that the Desjardins Movement managed to develop while taking into account both its core business (as a bank) and its purpose (as a cooperative). This study shows that the innovative potential of the mature social economy enterprise should not be underestimated.

Responsible Innovation: a Smithian Perspective

Adam Smith’s is often falsely portrayed as having argued that radical selfishness is a force for the good and that this “invisible hand’ is his market mechanism. This paper argues that Smith’s real market mechanism, the sympathy manoeuvre, is a viable alternative to Schumpeterian and mainstream models of innovation in economics and also could help build a firmer theoretical basis for other approaches such as Responsible Innovation. To Smith all human activity was social and must be understood and explained in terms of the sentiments involved. Discovery, for instance, is driven by three sentiments (wonder, surprise, admiration), economic activities by sympathetic imagination, the need for exchange, the need to better one’s position in life, and the need for gratitude. Through sympathetic imagination, his famous model of the impartial spectator, Smith elegantly connects the individual and society. Smith’s innovation process is thus an exercise in social construction and not a destructive process based on radical selfishness. The paper argues that this social innovation process is a viable alternative to the extant approaches that are essentially asocial and amoral (economism) or ideologically normative (Responsible Innovation).

Embedding social innovation process into the institutional context: Voids or supports

Social innovation (SI) is a complex construct that is lacking a unifying paradigm in social sciences. However, together with the recent attention towards social change, it requires a theoretical perspective that analyzes the construct within its institutional context (IC) without forgetting that the term is socially constructed. This current study aims to contribute to the literature by exploring and describing the inter-linkages between institutional voids (IVs)/institutional supports (ISs) perspectives and SI process by positioning the actor as the catalyzer and the change-agent. The study tries to explore if existing IVs or supports, which are embedded in social-welfare, commercial or public-sector logics, stimulate SI and result in the development of these ideas. The research setting is deliberately selected as a developing country that deals with plenty of IVs and suffers from the lack of ISs; a research setting that exhibits a high degree of heterogeneity and a low institutionalization level. The results indicate that IVs stimulate SIs mostly at the incremental and institutional level where IS is inadequate. The heterogeneity of IVs and a low degree of institutionalization result in the heterogeneity of actions undertaken for SI. Implications for practitioners and scholars are recommended at the end of the paper.

Financial social innovation to engage the economically marginalized: insights from an Indian case study

New sources of finance within the label of ‘impact investing’ have emerged as mechanisms to promote entrepreneurship within marginalized communities. Different vehicles for impact investment have emerged over the years; however, our understanding around their emergence, configuration and adoption is limited. Hence, the main purpose in this research is to study the role of the contextual drivers and conditions that gave rise to a unique form of impact investment in India, a financial social innovation – developmental venture capital (DVC). Through the lens of capital theories, insights from the case of India’s largest and oldest DVC firm along with three of its most prominent investees are presented. Findings highlight that the social entrepreneurs behind the case DVC wholly re-conceptualized silicon valley-style venture capital financing to suit small brick and mortar investments in rural India, developed mechanisms for deploying funding frugally, and created partnerships of equals between themselves and their investees. Investee founders leveraged human and social capital throughout the social innovation process via deep immersion in the socio-cultural milieu of India.

Grassroots Social Innovation for Human Development: An Analysis of Alternative Food Networks in the City of Valencia (Spain)

This paper explores the contribution the capability approach (CA) and grassroots innovation (GI) literature makes to a better understanding of the complexity, richness and specificity of bottom-up processes of social innovation (SI), and their specific contribution to social transformation. Using a purely qualitative methodology, the paper addresses a case study—organic food buying groups in the city of Valencia—and examines them through the lenses of SI, GI and CA. By taking four concurrent dimensions of the SI literature (agents, purposes, drivers and processes) and cross-fertilising them with the bottom-up, people-driven character of GI, and the concepts of agency, capabilities, deliberative democracy and conversion factors from the CA, the paper creates a novel framework that we call Grassroots Social Innovation for Human Development. The analysis shows the potentiality of this novel framework to illustrate the elements that a bottom-up SI process should include in order to contribute to human development.

Promoting Social Innovation Through Action Research: Evidence from an Empirical Study in the Fisheries Sector of Ukerewe District in Tanzania

This paper highlights the important role of action research in triggering and promoting social innovation processes in communities. By conceptualising social innovation as a process involving the development and delivery of new ideas for improving human capabilities and social relations, we argue that well-designed and well-executed action research can provide participants with opportunities to reflect on and develop shared understandings of individual and societal challenges and their possible solutions. Well-designed and well-executed action research also can provide participants with opportunities to critique and test proposed novel ideas, strategies, services and products, thereby determining their effectiveness or ineffectiveness in facilitating the realisation of envisioned social, economic and political goals. Drawing on evidence from empirical research undertaken in the fisheries sector of Ukerewe District in Tanzania, where small-scale fishers cogently argued for and positioned themselves as “constrained wealth creators” instead of poor actors, we illustrate how the provision of adequate spaces for dialogue enables the unveiling of innovative ideas and solutions to individual, sectoral and societal challenges.

Business-Led Social Innovation in the Work Integration Field: The Role of Large Firms and Corporate Foundations

The overall aim of this article is to understand the type of roles that corporate actors (large corporations and corporate foundations) play in social innovation processes taking place in the field of work integration. Its first specific goal is to depict the dynamics of the field in Spain. In order to achieve it, we describe the field and characterize the roles of relevant actors using strategic action field theory. The second goal consists of understanding how large firms and corporate foundations can contribute innovative solutions to the field. “Juntos por el Empleo”, a collective impact initiative to promote the work integration for the most vulnerable groups of population in Spain, is explored as an illustrative example. This cross-sector partnership, led by Accenture Foundation, encompasses the efforts of over 1000 organizations, including corporate actors. Data collection methods combine secondary sources, direct observations and in-depth interviews. Results of this qualitative research show a broad variety of innovative ways through which firms and corporate foundations can contribute to the work integration of the disadvantaged, such as participating in the design of tools or programs, disseminating sought after profiles, providing specialized training for particular job positions, designing personalized work paths, acting as large employers for low-qualified people, and finally mobilizing collective efforts and creating new resources through cross-sector partnerships. However, not all these alternatives are equally developed at this point. This paper contributes to fill a research gap about the roles played by corporate actors in social innovation processes and outcomes.

Building a middle-range theory of Transformative Social Innovation; theoretical pitfalls and methodological responses

This paper argues that there is currently a need for new theory on transformative social innovation that is able to provide empowering insights to practice, especially in terms of how social innovation interacts with transformative change processes. It identifies three ‘pitfalls’ that such theory-building needs to confront, and presents middle-range theory development, together with a focus on social relations and the processes of social innovation, as three elements of a theory-building strategy that responds to these pitfalls. In describing the implementation of this strategy in successive iterations between empirical case study research and integrative analysis, critical reflections are drawn on each of the three elements of the theory-building strategy. Taken together, these reflections underline the importance of maintaining a reflexive approach in developing new knowledge and theory on new social innovation. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31637/epsir.17-1.5

Detecting Social Innovation Agency; Methodological reflections on units of analysis in dispersed transformation processes

Considering that it is important for the social innovation research field to confront its methodological challenges, this contribution addresses the challenge of choosing appropriate units of analysis. Invoking insights from actor-network theory, it is demonstrated that this challenge is pervasive: the agency in social innovation processes is distributed and therefore fundamentally difficult to detect and ascribe. This elusiveness becomes particularly pressing in attempts towards systematic comparison of cases. Critically evaluating the three main unit of analysis choices that guided an international comparison of 20 transnational SI networks and their local manifestations, methodological lessons are drawn on the agents that SI can be ascribed to, on the transnational agency through which it spreads and on the relevant transformation contexts involved. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31637/epsir.17-1.8

Analysing the Social Innovation Process – The Methodology of Social Innovation Biographies

The dynamics of social innovation processes are of a complex nature and an underdeveloped research field. Social Innovation Biographies (SIBs) are a valuable methodology to reflect the evolutionary character of the dynamics of the social initiatives´ innovation processes in deepening the understanding of development paths, knowledge trajectories and stakeholder interactions at the micro-level. SIBs provide a comprehensive methodological solution including desk research, narrative interviews, semi-structured interviews, egocentric network analysis and triangulation as a step-by-step approach. SIBs allow to analyse social innovation cases and underlying processes in three dimensions: horizontally , vertically and comparatively . Besides its various advantages, SIBs also address methodological challenges related to the selection of critical cases, mobilising interviewees, securing the quantity and quality of information, overcoming selectiveness and reinforcing confidence. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31637/epsir.17-2.1

Gendered Potentials and Delimitations in the Church of Sweden’s Social Innovation

This paper presents a conceptual study of the gendered perspectives on welfare and diaconia articulated in two recently published policy documents by the Church of Sweden, the Church’s platform for welfare and the Bishop’s letter on diaconia. It distinguishes how social innovation processes in the Church are enhanced or hampered by gendered potentials and delimitations. Such processes are increasingly being perceived as essential to the changing role the Church has in society as a consequence of the formal separation from the Swedish state and the growing importance of civil society organizations (CSOs) as welfare-service providers in Sweden.

Social innovation communities

The concepts of hybridity and governance have been an important line of research in the context of social companies and public institutions. The purpose of this paper is to explore these notions in the framework of hybrid communities of social innovation by showing the importance of intangible capital in the improvement of functional skills, techniques and strategies when directing people towards social innovation processes. The relevance of these skills are presented through the results of the HEDABIDE project, a piloting research experience focused on the design of hybrid communities of social innovation in the province of Gipuzkoa (Basque Country, Spain) in 2014. The results of this project show the implications of social interactive spaces in acquiring different skills, competences and capabilities for social innovation inside communities of learning and practice when addressing social problems, concluding with a series of learned lessons and new paths of future research.

Social Innovation Communities

The concepts of hybridity and governance have been an important line of research in the context of social companies and public institutions. The purpose of this paper is to explore these notions in the framework of hybrid communities of social innovation by showing the importance of intangible capital in the improvement of functional skills, techniques and strategies when directing people towards social innovation processes. The relevance of these skills are presented through the results of the HEDABIDE project, a piloting research experience focused on the design of hybrid communities of social innovation in the province of Gipuzkoa (Basque Country, Spain) in 2014. The results of this project show the implications of social interactive spaces in acquiring different skills, competences and capabilities for social innovation inside communities of learning and practice when addressing social problems, concluding with a series of learned lessons and new paths of future research.

Farm Cultural Park: An Experience of Social Innovation in the Recovery of the Historical Centre of Favara

In 2010 some people from Favara decided to initiate a process of recovery and re-appropriation of the abandoned historical centre, by establishing Farm Cultural Park, a private cultural institution. This paper aims to describe the process of sustainable design, social innovation and inclusion, triggered by the Farm Cultural Park in the historical centre of Favara which, by showing its resilience, has redefined its identity, progressing from a place of widespread, unauthorised development to a dynamic creative city.

Design-Driven strategies for creative social innovation ecosystems

Purpose: Within the scientific literature on social innovation, several researchers from different areas are suggesting alternatives to promote, to sustain and to disseminate social innovation. However those approaches are unable to cope with the long-term sustainability of social innovation processes and projects mostly because they do not consider the contextual and processual dimensions. The paper presents an approach to fill this gap, which means to act in ecosystem perspective. Design / Methodology / Approach: The paper is an essay that critically explores the concepts of social innovation, design discourse, infrastructuring, seeding, and the contribution of design-driven strategies to the long-term sustainability and to the dissemination of social innovation processes, through reviewing design, management and sociology theories. Results: Through the exploration, discussion and association of the above presented concepts, we propose an approach to promote creative social innovation ecosystems based on design-driven strategies. Originality / value: The suggested approach takes into consideration all the different stages and dimensions of social innovation.

Outsiders and Intrapreneurs: The Institutional Embeddedness of Social Entrepreneurship in Germany

The social entrepreneurship discourse in Germany has become more prominent at a time when the deeply rooted corporatist traditions of social provision have come under pressure for marketization. This article examines the potential role of “social entrepreneurs” in the institutionally established German welfare state. The article analyzes the opportunities and constraints that new players face. Drawing on survey data and case studies in the areas of elderly care and advancement of children with immigrant background, the analysis retraces the structure and diffusion of social entrepreneurial projects. It concludes that the simple transfer of the social entrepreneurship model is unlikely. The analysis suggests that successful social ventures in Germany adapt the notion of social entrepreneurship to prevalent institutional realities. In the context of more encompassing social services, dense decentralized networks, and different cultures of philanthropism, new players have a complementary role that stimulates rather than dominates the process of social innovation.

Smart Cities Governance

Most of the definitions of a “smart city” make a direct or indirect reference to improving performance as one of the main objectives of initiatives to make cities “smarter”. Several evaluation approaches and models have been put forward in literature and practice to measure smart cities. However, they are often normative or limited to certain aspects of cities’ “smartness”, and a more comprehensive and holistic approach seems to be lacking. Thus, building on a review of the literature and practice in the field, this paper aims to discuss the importance of adopting a holistic approach to the assessment of smart city governance and policy decision making. It also proposes a performance assessment framework that overcomes the limitations of existing approaches and contributes to filling the current gap in the knowledge base in this domain. One of the innovative elements of the proposed framework is its holistic approach to policy evaluation. It is designed to address a smart city’s specificities and can benefit from the active participation of citizens in assessing the public value of policy decisions and their sustainability over time. We focus our attention on the performance measurement of codesign and coproduction by stakeholders and social innovation processes related to public value generation. More specifically, we are interested in the assessment of both the citizen centricity of smart city decision making and the processes by which public decisions are implemented, monitored, and evaluated as regards their capability to develop truly “blended” value services—that is, simultaneously socially inclusive, environmentally friendly, and economically sustainable.

La Apropiación Social de la Ciencia, la Tecnología y la Innovación (ASCTI): políticas y prácticas en Chile, Colombia, Ecuador y Perú

El texto toma como punto de partida el trabajo realizado por el Convenio Andrés Bello en el tema. El artículo presenta las principales transformaciones que se han sucedido en cuatro países de la región: Chile, Colombia, Ecuador y Perú, en el proceso de consolidación de la apropiación social de la ciencia y la tecnología. Se muestra cómo en la última década, en estos países, se ha producido un aumento en el uso del término de ‘apropiación social de la ciencia’ para designar tanto fines de políticas públicas en el tema, como -y con menor frecuencia- los procesos que se desarrollan. Igualmente, muestra que, a pesar de esta situación, en la región no se logra consolidar una visión conceptual claramente definida, si bien se identifican tendencias que asocian el término con fines relacionados con los procesos de democratización de la ciencia, construcción de una cultura científica y desarrollo humano y con medios como el diálogo de saberes, el aumento de la participación pública en ciencia y el desarrollo de procesos de innovación social.

Boundary dimensions of social innovation: negotiating conflicts and compatibilities when developing a national agenda

In order to add to the existing knowledge on the complex institutional dynamics of negotiating conflicts and compatibilities in innovation processes that address societal challenges and social needs, this article scrutinizes the scientific and societal debate on the theoretical and practical application of “social innovation” by means of the concept “boundary object” linked to institutional theory. A participatory case study of the development of an R&I agenda for social innovation in Sweden, formulated through dialog between stakeholders from the public, private and non-profit sectors, is presented. The results show that the unpredictable, emergent, evolving and adaptable character of needs, challenges and solutions in social innovation processes is made more theoretically and practically manageable by acknowledging social innovation as a boundary object. This is since this concept, despite its ambiguous character, helps balance complexity and usefulness in a way that serves to expand existing knowledge on institutional dynamics.