Emergence and diffusion of social innovation through practice fields

ABSTRACT

The paper analyses how social innovations diffuse after their initial development. By taking a practice theories’ perspective, the research suggests that social innovations diffuse through travelling elements of material, competence and meaning rather than solely through social interaction. This explains why similar social innovations, for example, urban gardening initiatives, emerge at a global scale without interaction between actors of different initiatives. It is argued that practice fields of social innovations promote the diffusion. Practice fields are bundles of similar social innovation initiatives, for example, car-sharing, urban gardening, repair cafés, etc. and facilitate the travelling of elements. Several further advantages are related to studying social innovation with a practice theories’ approach. These are amongst others the focus on activity and doing in contrast to different actors and their roles, the consideration of technology as an integral part of a practice and not as something opposed to social innovation, and the pronunciation of meaning giving credit to societal values and symbolic attributes related to social innovation.

KEYWORDS:

• Social innovation
• practice theories
• innovation diffusion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 SI-DRIVE involved 15 partners from 12 EU Member States and 10 from other parts of the world. The approach adopted ensured cyclical iteration between theory development, methodological improvements, and policy recommendations. Two mapping exercises at the European and the global level were carried out in the frame of SI-DRIVE (see section “Data Generation & Methodology” of this paper).

2 The mapping was conducted via standardised online questionnaire filled out by the local experts based on desk research. An interactive map is available online: https://www.socialinnovationatlas.net/.

3 As compared to more than 90 practice fields and 1005 social innovation cases analysed in SI-Drive (see Howaldt et al., 2016).

4 Within the policy field of poverty reduction, however, a slightly different process to define practice fields was applied, which in part was carried out after the database was closed (Millard et al., 2017, p. 17). For this reason, our analysis concentrated on practice fields in all policy fields but poverty reduction and sustainable development.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by FP7 Science in Society [grant number 612870].