Grounding innovation: towards an integrated concept

Academics, companies, the whole industrial sectors, as well as, governmental bodies, NGOs and journalists across the world contributed to the widespread use of the term and the different concepts of innovation. The proliferation of the term and variety of concepts of innovation in research, academic papers, academic books, business plans and official documents on different governmental levels, produced in many cases results which include sophisticated models, successful business practices and functioning inclusive policies. However, excessive use of the term innovation also produced a cacophony of meanings as well as a social and political context in which ‘innovation’ is used as a buzzword without a stable content. Innovation is often observed as a miraculous procedure in business, science and policy which brings new solutions to technological, economic, social and political problems, yet many diverse definitions and concepts are included in these procedures, leaving the field of innovation studies with porous boundaries and basic disagreements on the question – what constitutes innovation. The concentration on ‘newness’, often described as a unifying point in defining, theorising and applying innovation (Johannessen, Olsen, and Lumpkin 2001) cannot possibly unify scholars from different disciplines to advance a field of study by developing, if not consensus, then at least some wider agreement on the meaning, boundaries and reach of ‘innovation’ as a concept.

Of course, it is possible to argue that innovation does not need constraints in a form of a scientific, nor in a form of a practical or political consensus, in order to truly enable improvements and benefits in sciences, markets and societies. Further on, it is also possible to argue that late modernity, liquid modernity or second modernity (Giddens 1990; Bauman 2000; Beck and Grande 2010) as a general societal order does not allow any kind of fixation of fluid concepts, constituent of the perpetually produced changes in economy, politics and social relations. From this perspective, innovation is not only a field of study but also a constantly changing answer to uncertainties and dilemmas produced by late modernity and particularly by modern scientific knowledge (Höijer, Lidskog, and Uggla 2006).

However, cumulation and meaningful exchange of knowledge across scientific disciplines cannot reach its full potential without clear boundaries of the studied phenomena nor without a wider agreement on the definitions of the key terms and concepts trying to capture them. The success of any true innovation may depend on flexibility, creativity, adaptability and implementation of various solutions to perpetually emerging problems but the success of the scientific concept of innovation depends precisely on discipline and scrupulous theory building based on fittingly designed propositions. We can hardly find a good theory with poorly crafted concepts because concept formation and theory formation are intimately conjoined (Gerring 1999, 365). This special section of Innovation: The European Journal for Social Science Research is therefore dedicated to the analysis of the use of terms and concepts of innovation in different fields. It is our aim to revisit the definitions of innovation in different sciences and point to similarities rather than differences to start a discussion on possible bounding and grounding of the concept of innovation. Authors in this issue are interested in common aspects of different concepts of innovation, particularly within the economic, social and governmental framework.

Sanjay Singh and Yogita Aggarwal offer a qualitative synthesis of 208 definitions of innovation using a grounded theory approach to offer a unified definition of innovation. They provide a substantive analysis within seven broad themes underlying the definitions of innovations, i.e. creative potential, motivation, action, psychological processes, ecological processes, newness, and outcomes in the form of value creation, competitive advantage, harnessing of technology or invention, and economic growth. After a thorough analysis, they define innovation as the operationalisation of creative potential with a commercial and/or social motive by implementing new adaptive solutions that create value, harness new technology or invention, contribute to competitive advantage and economic growth. Their consensus definition is derived by integrating core propositions about a construct prevalent in existing definitions. Their analysis reaffirms the previous observations that innovation is multidimensional and multistage process. The three-stage input-process-output framework is frequently applied for understanding innovation in varied domains. Sanjay Singh and Yogita Aggarwal conclude that in the future, the information system research methods should be employed to explore a consensus definition of innovation. Qualitative data mining, machine learning, and self-organising maps methodology should be used for detecting patterns in definition and identifying pattern relationships to generate and validate the consensus definition.

Nurhan Dudaklı, Burcu Felekoğlu and Adil Baykasoğlu develop a conceptual model that focuses on the main building blocks of the successful reverse innovation process. They observe how products are developed and adapted to local needs and realities in terms of cost constraints, infrastructure, regulatory systems, and cultural differences and how they flow back to developed countries as recognised innovations or innovative products. They investigate the success/failure of reverse innovation attempts in local/global markets using a multiple secondary data-based case study approach. After a cross-case analysis concentrated on the main building blocks and critical interactions of the reverse innovation, they develop a unique reverse innovation process model. The proposed conceptual model detects three crucial components for the success of the reverse innovation. They emphasise the quality of the innovation idea, the cooperation between MNEs and local enterprises, and building appropriate and unique diffusion strategies as elements proving to be critical for the development of the reverse innovation. It is also possible to conduct a similar study by utilising the proposed model on other cases to perform analytical research with quantitative data. The model proposed by Nurhan Dudaklı, Burcu Felekoğlu and Adil Baykasoğlu is suitable for future studies because it provides a context for building metrics for the systematic evaluation of reverse innovation initiatives.

Ander Gurrutxaga Abad and Auxkin Galarraga Ezponda offer a critical and theoretical review of the concept of social innovation and address many unresolved controversies that have accompanied or followed its success. Innovation, in general, is now considered to be a social process which aims to meet human needs with technological and market-driven applications. However, non-technological and community-based dynamics are considered to be crucial for the positive social change. Social innovation has a complex nature and it is very difficult to delimit the concept and to make progress in scientifically operative terms. The authors approach social innovation primarily as a process to mobilise and accumulate resources and capacities for social action. Social innovation is less related to individual talent and much more to collective action and mobilisation where players are involved in empowerment dynamics thanks to institutional mechanisms or infrastructures. Ander Gurrutxaga Abad and Auxkin Galarraga Ezponda detect four main controversial issues in which academics have failed to reach a consensus: an ontological issue regarding to the understanding of the relationship between social innovation and the other types of innovation, a theoretical issue around revolving around the normative assumptions that are implicit in many of the definitions of social innovation, a methodological issue that reveals the difficulties of the empirical testing of social innovation and a political-ideological issue attached to the governance and practice of social innovation. These controversies emerged due to a lack of clarification of the relationship between innovation, transformation and social change. This is why we have to turn to social change theories which deal with transformative movements and multiple obstacles inherent in the current institutional architecture. These institutions sustain social orders that structure ways of living enabling or hampering social innovation.

Rick Hölsgens states that the governments in the EU countries but also the EU itself raised high policy expectations for social innovation and that the scientific interest in social innovation has been increasing over the last decade. However, these expectations and interests may not be fulfilled without a proper understanding of social innovation diffusion dynamics, particularly adopter characteristics. The vast bulk of the scientific literature on social innovation does not deal with adoption-side of innovation diffusion. He presents the result of a review of 468 publications on social innovation and concludes that the research on capacities of potential adopters is not satisfactory. The researchers should not shy away from complex issues such as adoption decision-making in social innovation but concentrate on multifaceted personal factors such as motivation, values and personal capacities while also dealing with structural constraints, such as material infrastructures and social norms. All levels of analysis have to be included social innovation research in order to enable the development of a robust innovation concept as well as truly applicable policies.

Diego Galego, Frank Moulaert, Marleen Brans and Gonçalo Santinha are particularly interested in commonalities as well as differences in the understanding of the concepts of social innovation and governance. They review five academic areas (political science and public administration, urban and territorial studies, sociology, sustainability and ecology, and culture and creativity studies) using the PRISMA method extension for scoping review to systematically review and summarise the most relevant dimensions that link social innovation and governance. They find that the dimensions connecting SI and governance can be grouped according to the three pillars of social innovation: collective action, social relations and socio-political transformations. The authors analyse the interpretations and interconnectedness of these pillars in the screened academic areas and show that strong interdisciplinary commonalities between different interpretations can be found.

Peter Meister Broekema, Lummina G. Horlings and Elisabeth Alice Maria Bulder show that co-creation gradually became part of the concept of social innovation and ultimately became an indicator for successful social innovation in the Horizon Europe Framework programme. The importance of co-creation in policies became unquestionable during the last decade, however, because the concept has not been conceptualised clearly in policy, this brought the risk of simplifying co-creation. The authors presented the ways in which interlinked use and implementation of the concept of social innovation and the concept of co-creation informed academic debate as well as EU policy. Their research showed the added value of the joint implementation of these concepts and described the diffusion of academic concepts into policies. The concept of co-creation was introduced and used primarily to deal with the inclusion of end-users, but soon it transformed into an indicator for societal impact and a critical criterion for successful social innovation. This enabled the co-creation to become incorporated into social innovation. It restored the original meaning of social innovation and helped in societal challenges.