Transformative Social Innovation Research Articles

Transformative social marketing and social innovation for sustainable development through participatory design with economically marginalized users

Purpose The study is positioned at the crossroads of transformative social marketing and social innovation literature through the lens of participatory design (PD). This exploratory study aims to explore how social enterprises in India engage economically marginalized people in transformative social marketing and innovation for sustainable development through PD. Design/methodology/approach The study includes a case study with a matched pairs analysis approach. The data analysis reports three themes depicting the role of PD in different stages of the social innovation process (codiscovery, codesign and scaling-up), the challenges faced in the process and the outcomes of the PD process. Findings The authors propose that social enterprises can act as sustainable development catalysts for more inclusive sustainable development through their proactive and creative uses of PD. Still, PD also has limitations for addressing the challenges stemming from marginalized contexts, which requires effective social marketing strategies to overcome. Originality/value The study contributes to the emerging dialogue on PD with marginalized users and widens the scope of studies on transformative social marketing and innovation. The findings also provide practical insights for PD practitioners on how designers can learn from diverse PD practices in the context of economically marginalized people.

The SMart cooperative model and scale-up experience: spreading social innovation in the cultural field across Europe

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore how, in a context of economic, political, social and environmental transitions, SMart, a cultural and artistic social enterprise (CASE), has developed a relevant cooperative model to contribute to mitigate the structural labour precariousness of artists and creators.Design/methodology/approachThe research design includes a mixed-method approach that combines qualitative and quantitative methodologies with emphasis on the former. Namely, the organisation is SMartbe and its replication across nine European countries was studied as a revelatory case study. Five main types of techniques were deployed in the course of this research, including desk review, direct (participant) observation, interviews, focus group and questionnaire (Likert-scale survey).FindingsCASEs constitute a specific institutional arrangement that offers innovative labour arrangements for cultural workers and artists to fight against precariousness. Social enterprises are embedded in the social and solidarity economy and stand at the crossroads of markets, civil society and the public, which places them in a critical position: depending on the logic, actors and contexts at play, social enterprises can ensure to varying degrees the general interest through their social mission, their sustainability via the real participation of all their stakeholders and the carrying out of economic activities that are fully consistent with their mission.Originality/valueIt is within this type of sustainability and participation that transformative social innovation can emerge within CASEs. Their potential to contribute to transformative social innovation is based on its four objectives: cultural (to imagine human, participative and sustainable alternatives); social (to achieve a social –including the environment – mission and join the ecosocial transition); participatory (empowering and impacting the public sphere); and economic (being financially sustainable and fair).

Codesign in Action: Design Principles to Successfully Manage Transformative Social Innovation

To meet grand challenges, organizations must rethink how they establish their objectives and processes in a more sustainable way. Social innovation is seen as a very promising way to respond to this call. Nevertheless, social innovation encounters difficulties in scaling and reaching its transformative power. On the basis of the theoretical framework of transition management, our article focuses on the codesign of transformative social innovation by trying to identify how actors can manage it successfully during the experimentation phase. We have conducted research based on the design science methodology to develop both concrete solutions to solve empirical problems and build strong design propositions. The results and design propositions stem from the analysis of three case studies of French social impact bonds (SIBs), which are contractual tools funding social innovation programs. SIBs are, by nature, codesign processes involving different types of stakeholders (private funders, public commissioners, and nonprofit organizations). This article provides six design principles to support the cooperation and alignment of multiple stakeholders to foster their scaling up, which is crucial for perpetuating social innovation. This research contributes theoretically to both the social innovation scaling literature and the transition management framework and offers practical guidelines to help social practitioners to codesign and manage transformative social innovations.

Juxtaposition, encounter and drift: transformative social innovation through culture and the arts

PurposeThis paper aims to tentatively explore the benefits of placing art’s knowledge-building tradition, with its capacity to disrupt and reframe, at the centre of how we look at alternative organizing and alternative economic spaces, positioning lived experience, its uncertainties intact, at the heart of researching and practicing social enterprise (SE).Design/methodology/approachThe paper explores indeterminacy through two case-study narratives, one of an academic arts-based research project and the other of a unique organization it encountered.FindingsThe paper describes the way juxtaposition, encounter and drift value indeterminacy as central to generative processes, challenging the control central to management and its research.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper proposes that adopting an arts-based approach that challenges control can create a research instrument sensitive to similar tendencies in case studies, thus highlighting what is different and alternative about them. This responds to concerns about the diminishing centrality of SE’s democratizing ethic expressed in its scholarship, about creativity in its research and about its socially transformative potential.Practical implicationsThe practice, by SEs of an approach welcoming chance, encounter, meandering paths and place-making with porous boundaries, proliferates transformative possibilities and is linked to democratization and participation.Originality/valueThough dangerously challenging to accepted notions of academic rigour, this paper proposes an unusual thought experiment tied in with lived experiences, in themselves experimental in practice.

Academic contributions to the development of evidence and policy systems: an EPPI Centre collective autoethnography

BackgroundEvidence for policy systems emerging around the world combine the fields of research synthesis, evidence-informed policy and public engagement with research. We conducted this retrospective collective autoethnography to understand the role of academics in developing such systems.MethodsWe constructed a timeline of EPPI Centre work and associated events since 1990. We employed: Transition Theory to reveal emerging and influential innovations; and Transformative Social Innovation theory to track their increasing depth, reach and embeddedness in research and policy organisations.FindingsThe EPPI Centre, alongside other small research units, collaborated with national and international organisations at the research-policy interface to incubate, spread and embed new ways of working with evidence and policy. Sustainable change arising from research-policy interactions was less about uptake and embedding of innovations, but more about co-developing and tailoring innovations with organisations to suit their missions and structures for creating new knowledge or using knowledge for decisions. Both spreading and embedding innovation relied on mutual learning that both accommodated and challenged established assumptions and values of collaborating organisations as they adapted to closer ways of working. The incubation, spread and embedding of innovations have been iterative, with new ways of working inspiring further innovation as they spread and embedded. Institutionalising evidence for policy required change in both institutions generating evidence and institutions developing policy.ConclusionsKey mechanisms for academic contributions to advancing evidence for policy were: contract research focusing attention at the research-policy interface; a willingness to work in unfamiliar fields; inclusive ways of working to move from conflict to consensus; and incentives and opportunities for reflection and consolidating learning.

Paradoxes of Transformative Social Innovation: From Critical Awareness towards Strategies of Inquiry

Society is transforming through a whirlpool of innovations. This includes technological as well as social innovations, i.e. changes in social relations involving new ways of doing, organizing, framing and knowing. Especially the potentials for transformative social innovation (TSI) are gaining the interest of progressive political actors and critical scholars. Occurring in the form of new modes of governance and alternative ways of working and living together, TSI involves the challenging, altering or replacing of dominant institutions. As documented in various strands of critical social inquiry and innovation research, TSI praxis is pervaded with contradictions, anomalies and paradoxes. This methodological contribution addresses the challenge that tends to remain: How to elaborate this general critical awareness into more operational ‘strategies of inquiry’? The paper discusses paradoxes of a) system reproduction, b) temporality, and c) reality construction. Identifying distinct kinds of contradictions and distinct empirical phenomena, this differentiation also calls attention to the associated differences between realist, processual and constructivist research philosophies. Gathering the empirical analyses, theoretical interpretations and methodological advances that have been made on these paradoxes, this contribution opens up the scope for critical and practically relevant innovation research: It is important to bridge the divide between rigorous but sterile methodological know-how, and critical-reflexive theorizing that lacks operational insights.

Editorial Presentation: Critical perspectives in social innovation, social enterprise and/or the social solidarity economy

Editorial Presentation: Critical perspectives in social innovation, social enterprise and/or the social solidarity economy

Designing “Down to Earth.” Lessons Learned from Transformative Social Innovation

ABSTRACT The consequences of anthropocentric ways of thinking, designing, producing, and consuming are becoming painfully clear. Moving from this observation, several designers have become aware that design culture needs to reorient itself beyond anthropocentrism. In this article, we start with Bruno Latour’s proposal of coming “down to Earth,” which acknowledges that we are ultimately “terrestrials,” and connect it to Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s idea of “care.” These concepts are pillars of the concrete guidelines we propose here: they are foundations for designing in a regenerative way, stepping beyond anthropocentrism. This paper traces a convergence between this emergent account of design and some recent social innovations, which are, in our opinion, making what it might mean to get down to Earth tangible. This convergence becomes particularly evident when introducing the concept of the “quality of complexity”: in other words, a qualitative dimension characteristic of those experimentations in which people re-orient their daily lives towards reweaving the web of life. While designing can strengthen its ability to be regenerative by exploring how to further engage with practices with this specific qualitative dimension, it might also provide philosophy with some concrete examples of a praxis taking further concrete steps down to Earth.

Transformative social innovation in developing and emerging ecosystems: a configurational examination

Despite the literature on social innovation (SI) in ecosystems growing considerably in recent years, what makes an ecosystem a facilitator for transformative SI remains unexamined, particularly indeveloping and emerging countries. Our research aims to fill this literature gap by determining which combination of characteristics—stemming from stakeholder theory and knowledge management–turns local smallholder coffee farmers in developing and emerging producing countries into autonomous and empowered partners and catalysts for spreading SI initiatives locally. We adopt a configurational approach using fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of 18 SI projects that coffee MNEs, nongovernmental organizations, and institutions have undertaken to favor such an egalitarian value co-creation with local stakeholders. We demonstrate that stakeholder empowerment, cooperative strategic posturing, knowledge transfer, and local knowledge exchange are necessary conditions within the ecosystem to create local autonomy as an antecedent for transformative SI. The novelty in our approach lies in proposing a shift from a pure firm-centric perspective based on stakeholder dependence to a more participatory relational perspective that entails lower-power stakeholders’ interdependence and collaboration for autonomous decision-making, thereby advancing fresh thinking on stakeholder and knowledge management applied to SI in developing and emerging contexts. We also propose practical suggestions to deal with stakeholder power’s imbalances, which might limit the ecosystems’ adaptation toward transformative SI.

Looking beyond the hype: Conditions affecting the promise of behaviour change apps as social innovations for low-carbon transitions

Digital tools, specifically smartphone apps, have emerged as enablers of social innovation for low-carbon transitions by using novel feedback to creatively engage people to act more sustainably, and thus capture the power of collective individual action. Such apps have increasingly been implemented in real-world experiments with positive results in the short-term. However critical reflection is required to look beyond this hype to understand the conditions for longer term impact, thus reaching a transformative social innovation potential. In this paper, we take two exemplary behaviour change apps and perform a cost-benefit analysis to assess the break-even point in number of users to achieve net-positive impact and discuss relevant technical, organisational, political and financial conditions that enable or impede this impact. We find that the required scale-up in users seems challenging, yet feasible. However, guaranteeing that the supportive conditions are available is necessary to warrant the focus on behaviour change apps by research and policy.

Food bank practices, local development and the potential of community wealth building and universal basic services in the UK

In the UK, the proliferation of voluntary and community organisations (VCOs) providing emergency food aid has been the subject of critical scrutiny. Analysis has called for further work to understand and act upon the diverse practices taking place within and across food banks. We consider how co-ordinators of food banks in the county of Northumberland have responded to interlocking crises and rising demand, and how they reflect upon their practices. We embed their views and experiences within a critical, contextualised analysis of a core tension: how to provide food in a minimally stigmatising manner, while simultaneously arguing and acting for the end of such activities. We consider the implications of such tensions for approaches to local development, focusing on two key elements of a ‘transformative social innovation’ approach: system innovation and narratives of change. We argue that without significant change in, and challenges to, these ‘shades of change’, enacting (empowering) transformative social innovation in relation to food insecurity will be difficult. In doing so, we consider the potential of community wealth building (CWB) and universal basic services (UBS) to enable innovative change in social and system practices and enhance social infrastructure.

Transformative Social Innovation and ‘The Political’ Organizing in the Dutch Climate Movement

Transformative Social Innovation and ‘The Political’ Organizing in the Dutch Climate Movement

Communal sharing within and beyond digital platforms: Prefiguring interdependent sharing cities

While life-as-usual remains disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic, cities rely increasingly on community-based and often digitally-enabled sharing of knowledge, skills and resources. These emergent forms of ‘communal sharing’ cannot be explained through instrumentally-beneficial economic discourses or structurally-disruptive political narratives alone. Rather, they call for revaluing the interdependent social relations that digital platforms enable and maintain. Drawing from a relational ontology of transformative social innovation, this paper begins to reframe communal sharing as inherently interdependent social relations between citizens and across civic, market and government domains. These interdependencies mean that sharing through digital platforms is not only responding to, or resisting, dominantly neoliberalist urban logics but is both formed by and reforming new understandings of urban agency. To explore these new understandings of being, doing and thinking of the city as shared, the paper adopts a generative epistemology of postcapitalist politics. Reading communal sharing as not merely interdependent but as fundamentally prefigurative of urban structures, norms and behaviours, the paper develops a post-structuralist approach to sharing cities. This approach illustrates practices as co-determined, communities as resourceful, and initiatives as highly adaptive socio-spatial performances taking place within and beyond digital platforms. Recognising and nurturing the enabling role of digital in sharing cities, the paper adopts the hopeful stance of reconceptualising communal sharing to open space for social and sectoral divides to be bridged and reimagined beyond the pandemic accelerations of platform capitalism.

Network leadership for transformative capacity development: roles, practices and challenges

Non-technical summary A wide variety of social innovations exist today that offer urgently needed pathways for transforming societal systems into more just, sustainable and regenerative ways of organising human existence on this planet. However, a more systematic and practically useful understanding is needed of how individuals and organisations can strengthen the transformative capacity of people working on connecting, spreading, maturing and structurally embedding these innovations. This study presents an updated conceptual framework of network leadership roles and practices, and describes how these can contribute to more widespread, systemic and lasting impact of social innovations. Technical summary This study tests and refines a conceptual framework, describing the roles and practices of network leadership that can support the development of transformative capacities, in the context of social innovation networks. Such capacities include spreading social innovations in wider society, embedding them in policy and public discourse, and generating continuity and further development of social innovation activities. We studied five cases of transnational social innovation networks involving community-led and student-led sustainability initiatives. Practitioners in these networks were asked to rate and comment on the perceived recognisability and importance of network leadership roles and practices, as well as challenges, which we articulated in a previous study and further developed in the current study through participant observation and document analyses. This resulted in a revision of the roles and practices, the identification of relations between roles and a better understanding of how they can contribute to transformative capacity development. The interviews also helped to clarify the practical usefulness of the framework, suggesting possible applications for evaluating, prioritising and aligning roles performed by various individuals and organisations. The findings are relevant for better understanding and guiding distributed agency in transformative social innovation networks. Social media summary Roles and practices for network leadership to enable more widespread, systemic and lasting impact of social innovation.

Challenges and opportunities for social entrepreneurs in civil engineering in Brazil

PurposeThis paper aims to identify challenges and opportunities for social enterprises (SE) in civil engineering in Brazil.Design/methodology/approachStarting from the transformative social innovation theory and inspired by grounded theory principles, this paper conducts three-stage exploratory research. First, this paper mapped the Brazilian SE civil engineering ecosystem. Next, this paper classified the SE initiatives along with an organizing framework. Finally, this paper conducted 11 interviews with key ecosystem actors and analyzed data through iterative, parallel and interrelated content analysis procedures.FindingsThe 37 SE found were classified along “Sustainability,” “Housing,” “Transportation” and “Sanitation” pillars, which are aligned with the United Nations’ social development goals. This paper found 50 challenges and opportunities, which were aggregated along seven dimensions. Three elements are particularly relevant as opportunities: opportunities for SE with ecosystem supporters, specialized investors and partnership with major companies; while government and early investment are the most relevant challenges.Research limitations/implicationsResearch findings and conclusions cannot be extended to other sectors and countries. Usual limitations associated with exploratory qualitative research must also be highlighted.Practical implicationsThe government should offer financial and technical support for civil engineering in working in partnership with ecosystem supporters. Academy could use SE content and ecosystem for its students and should offer diverse resources for network creation.Originality/valueFocusing on civil engineering SE in Brazil, this study sheds light on a high-impact sector that has not been studied yet.

New Governance Ways Aimed at Protecting Nature for Future Generations: The Cases of Bangladesh, India and New Zealand: Granting Legal Personhood to Rivers

Recently, three important rivers in Asia and Oceania were acknowledged as legal persons. Questions emerge, such as: Which motivation drives the people who urged the respective courts and governments to grant these rivers legal personhood, in other words, to create Rights of Nature? Do these events lead to transformative social innovation and change our perspectives of how we see nature? As methodology we employ doctrinal research, examining original legal documents and contemporary news sources concerning the three grassroots initiatives on the rivers. The analysis reveals that there are different reasons for proposing this innovative legal approach of creating Rights of Nature. They include: providing people access to clean rivers for drinking water, sanitation, transportation and agricultural purposes; preventing the river from disappearing; addressing the issue of pollution and toxicity of river water; acknowledging the divine status of the river; and honouring indigenous beliefs concerning the river. The research findings demonstrate transformative social innovation: in all three cases, grassroots initiatives led to a system change. Moreover, dissemination of information concerning individual cases inspires other societal groups to reconsider the situation of their own ecosystems and to develop innovative governance possibilities, thereby honouring an alternative worldview in which human beings see themselves as part of nature rather than owning it just for utilitarian purposes.

Transformative Social Innovation in Rural Areas: Insights from a Rural Development Initiative in the Portuguese Region of Baixo Alentejo

Abstract The role of social innovation initiatives in contributing to sustainable rural development has been discussed both in academia and practice. Some scholars argue that, rather than delivering solely on unmet needs and services, social innovation should have a broader transformative impact. By applying Castro-Arce and Vanclay’s analytical framework for transformative social innovation (2020), the paper seeks to analyse the experience of a rural development initiative based in Portugal. The results of this exploratory study indicate that, in triggering bottom-linked governance, the initiative has taken on the bridging roles of knowledge broker, resource broker, shared vision champion, transparency and conflict resolution agent, and network enabler. Alongside taking on these bridging roles, the initiative under study, while promoting cooperation and knowledge exchange, has encountered some challenges further discussed in the paper. Finally, the paper makes some suggestions on how the proposed framework could be enriched.

Understanding social innovation in local energy transitions processes: A multi-case study

Social innovation (SI) in local energy transitions is gaining focus in current times but energy transitions have not yet been explicitly analysed in the context of SI. Our objective is to characterize SI in co-created local energy transitions processes through the study of three distinct cases based on energy transitions in localities in Sweden (Skåne and Dalsland) and Denmark (Hjørring). In these localities, municipality actors (MA) are engaged in increasing the adoption of solar PV systems, uptake of EV and biogas cars, and phasing out oil-burners, respectively. We analyse the three cases by following the work of the MAs and through the frame of Transformative Social Innovation (TSI), which consists of four shades; social innovation, system innovation, game-changers, and narratives of change. Subsequently, we use causal loop diagrams to characterize the SI in the oil-burner phase-out case. We see shades of SI and system innovation but there are no ‘game changers’ or ‘narratives of change’ yet in any of the cases.

Transformative Social Innovation as a Lens for ML for Good

Transformative Social Innovation as a Lens for ML for Good

Towards a theory of transformative social innovation: A relational framework and 12 propositions

This paper responds to the need in innovation research for conceptual clarity and solid theory on social innovation (SI). The paper conceptualizes SI as changing social relations, involving new ways of doing, knowing, framing and organizing, and theorizes transformative social innovation (TSI) as the process of SI challenging, altering, or replacing dominant institutions in a specific social-material context. Three advances towards TSI theory are proposed. First, we reflect epistemologically on the challenges of theory-building, and propose an appropriate research design and methodology. Middle-range theory is developed through iteration between theoretical insights and comparative empirical study of 20 transnational SI networks and about 100 associated initiatives. Second, we synthesize various innovation theories and social theories into a relational framework that articulates the distributed agency and institutional hybridization involved. Third, we formulate twelve propositions on the emergence of SI initiatives, on the development of SI ecosystems, on institutionalization processes, and on the historical shaping of SI. The paper ends with a critical assessment of the advances made, also identifying further challenges for TSI theory and practice.