A comprehensive concept of social innovation and its implications for the local context – on the growing importance of social innovation ecosystems and infrastructures

ABSTRACT

The significance of social innovations for successfully meeting social, economic, political and environmental challenges of the twenty-first century is recognized not only by stakeholders on the local, regional and even national level but also within the Europe 2020 strategy and on a global scale. However, despite this growing awareness, for a long time a sustained and systematic analysis of social innovation, its theories, characteristics and impacts was missing. In this setup, the paper seeks to contribute to a common theoretical ground in social innovation theory by elaborating on a comprehensive concept of social innovation grounded in social theory and discusses consequences for social innovations in the urban context. The paper starts with an outline of theoretical foundations of social innovation and investigates the relationship between social innovation and social change. It then discusses the consequences of a comprehensive concept of social innovation for the local level, highlighting its multi-sectoral perspective. Social innovation ecosystems are introduced as an emerging theoretical approach and heuristic model especially for urban social innovation. Here, results of a global mapping conducted by the international research project SI-DRIVE provide empirical insights into the diversity and current state of social innovation initiatives.

KEYWORDS:

• New innovation paradigm
• social innovation theory
• social practices
• urban development
• social innovation ecosystems
• social innovation infrastructures

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Christoph Kaletka http://orcid.org/0000-0002-5492-030X

Notes

1 See the manifold contributions in Harrisson, Bourque, and Széll (2009); Franz et al. (2012) and Moulaert et al. (2013a).

2 See e.g. SI-DRIVE (www.si-drive.eu), SIMPACT (http://www.simpact-project.eu/), TRANSIT (http://www.transitsocialinnovation.eu/) and CrESSI (http://www.sbs.ox.ac.uk/faculty-research/research-projects/cressi).

3 SI-DRIVE is funded within the 7th Framework Programme of the European Union. The project is working on the theoretical concepts, areas of empirical research and observable trends in the field of social innovation on both European and global scales. The results of the project are summarized in the ‘Atlas of Social Innovation. New Practices for a better Future’ (Howaldt, Kaletka, Schröder, & Zirngiebl, 2018).

4 It has to be noted that, while the Schumpeterian approach can indeed be considered a cornerstone of modern innovation research with merits also in social innovation, innovation as a historical concept dates back centuries further – for an exhaustive synopsis see Godin (2015).

5 The authors of a study relating to the OECD Committee for Industry, Innovation, and Entrepreneurship (CIIE) advance this thesis: ‘A new nature of innovation is emerging and reshaping public policy’ (FORA, 2010).

6 The term relates to the Schumpeterian definition of innovation as a new combination of production factors.

7 Jessop et al. (2013) argue that combining theories of social change by such classics as Weber, Durkheim or Schumpeter with a practice-oriented analysis of developments in recent decades is essential in order to give a coherent epistemological status and methodological fundament to social innovation analysis. In this context, they advocate for analyzing social innovation in light of social change and not as a part of a multi-dimensional innovation system. According to the authors, social innovation is about a completely new ontology, which has to do with socialized change practices instead of organizational efficiency and an optimized use of knowledge. This notion of a different ontological perspective and an orientation towards a constitutive, performative role of social practices and their transformative potential is an interesting idea which would be worth further development. At the same, the idea of giving social innovation analysis a coherent epistemological status and methodological fundament through recourse to theories of social change is only discussed, but not yet applied by the authors.

8 Czarniawska (2009) shows how a series of European capitals have developed a close network of imitative relationships. Political authorities, public administration and management observe trends in other cities which become fashionable and imitate them. The process of adaptation makes imitation a new creation, be it because of changes in the form or in the content. Czarniawska’s interpretation of Tarde’s concept of imitation regarding big cities is particularly useful in order to understand how innovations from public sector can be created and implemented on the local level. Here, imitation of fashions can play a key role.

9 Klein, Fontan, Harrisson, and Lévesque (2013) describe the development of the Québec Model as social innovation linked to social transformation. ‘From this standpoint, participative governance, co-production of services or activities, co-construction of public policies, as well as the plural character of the economy […] represent important dimensions of social innovation’ (Klein et al., 2013, p. 382). Thereby they identify the ‘economic turn’ – ‘the fact that social movements have switched from merely demanding actions from other to proactive actions at the economic level’ (Jonker, 2013, p. 382) – as an important source for social innovation (Jonker, 2013, p. 371).

10 A database of 1005 cases of social innovation initiatives has been created, covering about 80 countries on all world continents. The different aims and objectives of the initiatives were summarized in seven thematic policy fields (education, employment, environment, mobility & transport, health & social care, poverty & sustainable development). Criteria in this expert-based selection process were the compliance of the cases with the working definition of social innovation used in the project (Howaldt & Schwarz, 2010, p. 26; the definition was introduced in Section 2.2) and the accessibility of information on the case which had to be sufficiently rich in order to complete the survey used for the mapping. The first empirical phase of SI-DRIVE, in which the mapping was complemented by reports on social innovation in the seven policy fields, reports on social innovation in different world regions, and policy and foresight workshops, has produced an explorative and unique inventory of social innovation around the world, empirically underlining the diversity and plurality of concepts, objectives and actors and their diverse roles within a social innovation process. A qualitative case study analysis of 70 initiatives worldwide will be conducted in the second empirical phase of SI-DRIVE.