Social Innovation, Individuals and Societies: An Empirical Investigation of Multi-layered Effects

ABSTRACT

Empirical investigation of social innovation and its effects is a much under-explored terrain. Difficulties range from the conceptual complexity of social innovation processes to empirical implementation. This study applies a conceptual framework (ESGM) that envisages multi-layered effects of social innovation on individuals and societies. It analyzes subjective, primary data to compare three different European cases, proposing an empirical strategy to capture their effects. Perceptions of participants report improvements in autonomy and that social innovations mainly produce intangible outcomes such as knowledge and personal relationships, which are unlikely to be captured in synthetic measures such as average effects or money metrics.

KEYWORDS:

• Social innovation
• empowerment
• impact analysis
• subjective evaluation
• Europe

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Flavio Ceravolo, Lara Maestripieri, Toa Giroletti and Marco Gavazzoni for their contributions during primary data collection, as well as various partners of the CrESSI consortium and two anonymous reviewers for comments received on earlier versions of this study.

Disclosure statement

The authors are not aware of any potential conflict of interest.

Notes

1. For an overview, see Social Innovation Europe (SIE), or other deliverables produced by the CrESSI project (e.g. Edmiston 2015).

2. In the CrESSI project, social innovation is defined as ‘the development and delivery of new ideas and solutions (products, services, models, markets, processes) at different socio-structural levels that intentionally seek to change power relations and improve human capabilities, as well as the processes via which these solutions are carried out’ (CrESSI Consortium 2013, 3).

3. CESNAP is an alternative acronym to NACEMP, which has also been used across different publications of the research project.

4. Originally, in Mann, this dimension is ‘Military’, hence the NACEMP acronym. For our investigative purposes, the notion of ‘security-related’ has been deemed more appropriate.

5. For more in-depth description of the three cases and additional empirical results, see Chiappero-Martinetti et al. (2016).

6. Note that the definition of marginalized groups is part of ex-ante assumptions of the research design. While we asked social innovators whether they considered their beneficiaries/target groups to be marginalized, we did not collect subjective opinions about perceived own marginalization among the respondents of the survey. We also did not dwell into the political implications of the concept.

7. For a critique on RCTs along these lines, see Rodrik (2008), Deaton (2010) and Basu (2013). These authors stress that the results produced through RCTs have the so-called interval validity – valid for the specific case and context, but cannot be generalized, therefore lacking the so-called external validity.

8. Social innovators in this study are those individuals and groups that have set up the social innovation and are currently taking care of managing it. In some cases, social innovators are also the beneficiaries.

9. We have opted for the harmonic mean after implementing a thorough sensitivity analysis in which arithmetic, geometric and harmonic means have been assessed as potential aggregation operators. NUTS levels are European administrative levels used by Eurostat for data collection.

10. The technique used in this phase is called brainstorming (Bezzi and Baldini 2006); this is a group interview aimed at producing knowledge by using a bottom-up approach in which the knowledge is co-constructed in a group discussion directly with interviewees. This technique is usually employed for bottom-up definitions of indicators for assessing a specific process or outcome. For simplicity reasons, we refer to ‘focus groups’ and not to ‘brainstorming’ in this report.

11. We would like to thank an anonymous reviewer for this comment.

12. Results are not included in this article but are available on request.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration [grant agreement number 613261] and Directorate-General for Research and Innovation.