Context dependency of social innovation: in search of new sustainability models

ABSTRACT

Increasing attention is being paid towards the potential of social innovation (SI) in responding to society’s greatest challenges. While measures have been taken to support the flourishing of these innovations, they have thus far been made on ideal models of development, misaligned with what occurs in reality. This has led to the creation of supporting infrastructures that fail to respond to the real needs of social innovators. The article seeks to provide a picture of the real SI development process through a case-based discussion coming from the results of the SIMPACT European research project. The article will also present areas of improvement and reflection, on which to develop an evidence-based model of SI development. Moreover, it will connect SIs with local conditions that determine their development, suggesting that their growth and diffusion are primarily based on the adaptation to the context rather than on the scaling up mechanisms that characterize for-profits. The article argues that this leads to the necessity for social innovators to find a difficult balance among contradictory needs, and to develop peculiar typologies of business models to make their innovations sustainable.

KEYWORDS:

• Social innovation process
• scaling up of social innovation
• social innovation policies
• social innovation tools
• design for social innovation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Reverse engineering is the application of a tool and a process normally used for the generation of new businesses to the analysis of existing ones.

2 Catering Solidario was a Seville-based, organic catering firm employing women coming out of domestic violence.

3 Education for Accommodation fights children’s social, economic and cultural exclusion by combining learning support for children with the provision of affordable living for students; thereby, lowering high vacancy rates in Duisburg-Marxloh.

4 Yalla Trappan is a social enterprise addressing the inclusion of immigrant women in the Swedish labour market and society.

5 Semi di Libertà (Seeds of Freedom) is a non-profit organization based in Rome working to socially re-integrate prisoners through work by placing them on a pathway of training and professionalization in order to break the circle of recidivism.

6 Piano C is a commercial enterprise based in Milan, established as a co-working space dedicated to women, offering a set of services for work-life reconciliation to support young mothers to re-organize their work after the maternity leave or to re-enter the labour market after birth.

7 Libera Terra is an Italian a network of social enterprises producing organic food and wine on lands confiscated from the mafias.

8 BENISI (Building a European Network of Incubators for Social Innovation) built a Europe-wide network of networks of incubators for social innovation. This network identified at least 300 social innovations with high potential for scaling successfully and ensured the delivery of support services to them. Networks were already structured in a collaborative mode, able to spread knowledge and practice horizontally and were thus exploited to develop a Europe-wide programme, trying to balance local action with continent-wide strategy and vision.

9 TRANSITION (Transnational Network for Social Innovation Incubation) supported the establishment and growth of social innovations across Europe by developing a network of incubators which brought together partners within the fields of social innovation and innovation-based incubation. TRANSITION also provided learning outputs on which methodologies are most effective in a given region and the level of impact of these methodologies when transferred between regions.

10 A logic model is a synthetic graphical representation of the causal relationships between the resources, activities, outputs and outcomes of a programme. Logic models are characterized by a sequential structure, in which a series of ‘if-then’ relationships connect the elements of the model. Even if logic models are primarily used in the evaluation stage of a programme, their use in planning and implementation has been suggested within a backcasting frame (Taylor-Powell, Jones, & Henert, 2002).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by FP7 Socio-Economic Sciences and Humanities [grant number 613411].