Innovations in Doing and Being: Capability Innovations at the Intersection of Schumpeterian Political Economy and Human Development

Abstract

This paper seeks to contribute to a conceptual perspective with which to approach the evaluations and explanation of social entrepreneurs as agents of social change. First, it discusses the capability approach as a comprehensive normative framework with which to articulate ‘the social’ in a way that deals with the triple challenge of specifying ‘the social’ in a context of conflicts of interests, value diversity and exclusive public spheres. Second, the paper proposes two explanatory hypotheses of innovation for social change: (a) social innovation as the carrying out of new combinations of capabilities; (b) social entrepreneurs as characterized by their capacity to imagine and carry out new combinations of capabilities. The combination of capabilities suggests a subset of human development where ethics meets innovation: a capability innovation pathway at the crossroads of long-term, societal perspectives on change (human development, Schumpeterian economic development) where innovation is social and capability advancement entrepreneurial.

Key Words:

• Social innovation
• development
• capability approach
• Schumpeter
• evaluation
• explanation

Acknowledgements

This paper has much benefited from discussions at the International Social Innovation Research Conference, Oxford, September 2009 and the Anschub 2010 at the University of Lüneburg, May 2010. I also would like to thank Amelia Pope, Juha Hiedanpää, Lena Partzsch, the referees as well as the editor Alex Nicholls for comments and assistance with this paper. Finally, I would like to acknowledge the financial support of the program SÖF of the German Ministry of Education and Research.

Notes

1. Here this point has been demonstrated via an analysis of Swedberg's approach. However, a similar argument can be made with respect to other Schumpeterian approaches to social entrepreneurship. Consider the analysis of ‘creative destruction’ in terms of an adaptive cycle as proposed by Westley et al. (2006), and here the meaning of ‘integrity’ (Westley et al. 2006, ch. 3).

2. ‘Capability’ is here used to refer to the entire set of potential functionings, and ‘capability’ also is used to refer to potential functionings directly.

3. For a detailed account, see MEA (2003, pp. 56ff).

4. Social entrepreneurs are defined as change agents that have a social mission.

5. Whatever the social entrepreneur defines as ‘social’ is ‘social’.

6. Note that ‘all affected’ also makes it possible to consider effects on future generations and thus a core dimension of sustainability. Nussbaum's list of basic capabilities can serve as an absolute standard of intergenerational justice (Ott and Döring 2004).

7. Martha Nussbaum (2000, p. 80) speaks under the label ‘affiliation’ of ‘being able to work as a human being, exercising practical reason and entering into meaningful relationships of mutual recognition with other works’.

8. Figure 2 very much benefits from in-depth studies by Pamela Keirns (2007), Kate Ganly and Johanna Mair (2009) as well as personal communication with Joseph Madiath.