Social innovation refers to new strategies, concepts, ideas and organizations that meet social needs of all kinds - from working conditions and education to community development and health - and that extend and strengthen civil society.

Over the years, the term has developed several overlapping meanings. It can be used to refer to social processes of innovation, such as open source methods. Alternatively it can be used to innovations which have a social purpose - like microcredit or distance learning. The concept can also be related to social entrepreneurship (entrepreneurship isn't always or even usually innovative, but it can be a means of innovation) and it also overlaps with innovation in public policy and governance. Social innovation can take place within government, within companies, or within the nonprofit sector (also known as the third sector), but is increasingly seen to happen most effectively in the space between the three sectors.

History

Social innovation was discussed in the writings of figures such as Peter Drucker and Michael Young (founder of the Open University and dozens of other organizations) in the 1960s.^[1]. It also appeared in the work of French writers in the 1970s, for example Pierre Rosanvallon, Jacques Fournier, and Jacques Attali ^[2]. However, the themes and concepts in social innovation have existed long before that. Benjamin Franklin, for example, talked about social innovation in terms of small modifications within the social organisation of communities ^[3] that could help to solve everyday problems. Many radical 19th century reformers like Robert Owen, founder of the cooperative movement, promoted innovation in the social field and all of the great sociologists including Karl Marx, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim focused much of their attention to broader processes of social change. However, more detailed theories of social innovation only became prominent in the 20th century. Joseph Schumpeter, for example, addressed the process of innovation more directly with his theories of creative destruction and his definition of entrepreneurs as people who combined existing elements in new ways. In the 1980s and after, writers on technological change increasingly addressed the importance of social factors in affecting technology diffusion^[4]

Recent developments

The idea of social innovation has become much more prominent with ongoing research, blogs and websites (such as the social innovation exchange) ^[5], and a proliferation of organisations working on the boundaries of research and practical action. Several currents have converged in this area, including:

• new thinking about innovation in public services, pioneered particularly in some of the Scandinavian and Asian countries. Governments are increasingly recognising that innovation isn't just about hardware: it is just as much about prisons and healthcare, schooling and democracy. ^{[6] [7]}
• growing interest in social entrepreneurship.^[8]
• business, which is increasingly interested in innovation in services.^[9]
• new methods of innovation inspired by the open source field.^[10]
• linking social innovation to theory and research in complex adaptive systems to understand its dynamics.^[11]

A recent overview of the field highlighted the growing interest of public policy makers in supporting social innovation in these different sectors, notably in the UK, Australia, China and Denmark.^[12] A focus of much recent work has been on how innovations spread ^[13] and on what makes some localities particularly innovative.^[14]

History of Social Innovation and territorial development

There is another extensive literature on social innovation in relation to territorial (or regional) development, which covers: first, innovation in the social economy, i.e. strategies for satisfaction of human needs; and second, innovation in the sense of transforming and/or sustaining social relations, especially the governance relations at the regional and local level. A combination of both the modes provides a comprehensive approach to innovation in social and economic dynamics within territories. In Europe, from the late 1980s, research on social innovation from a territorial perspective was initiated by Jean-Louis Laville^[15] and Frank Moulaert^[16] and has been going on since then. In Canada CRISES initiated this type of research. The first large scale research project to work on territorial innovation analysis was SINGOCOM Social Innovation, Governance, and Community Building a European Commission Framework 5 project (2002-2004), that offered wide ranging discussions on Alternative Models for Local Innovation (ALMOLIN).

Some noted scholars

• Jean-Louis Laville
• Frank Moulaert
• Geoff Mulgan
• Michael D. Mumford?
• Abraham George
• Akhtar Hameed Khan

See also

• civil society
• KATARSIS Project
• post fordism
• public administration
• social entrepreneurship
• Bidah (Islamic concept of innovation in religion)
• KaosPilots_NL
• The Young Foundation

References

External links

• The social innovation exchange - SIX
• The Hub - global network of social innovation building spaces
• ''Enterprising Social Innovation: the most intriguing form of social entrepreneurship'', Greg Dees and Beth Anderson
• Discover Social Innovation, a collaboration of the China Centre for Comparative Political Economy, British Council and Young Foundation
• Research Area "O" Economy, Society and Territory from the European Association for Evolutionary and Political Economy

Journals

• The Stanford Social Innovation Review
• The Research Initiative on Social Entrepreneurship Columbia Business School
• Social Enterprise Initiative Harvard Business School
• Innovations: Technology, Governance, Globalization from MIT