New Frontiers in Social Innovation Research

*Also by Alex Nicholls*:

SOCIAL INNOVATION Blurring Boundaries to Reconfigure Markets

*Also by Julie Simon*:

THE OPEN BOOK OF SOCIAL INNOVATION

*Also by Madeleine Gabriel*:

MAKING IT BIG Strategies for Scaling Social Innovations

# **New Frontiers in Social Innovation Research**

Edited by

Alex Nicholls *Professor of Social Entrepreneurship, University of Oxford, UK*

Julie Simon *Research Programme Lead, The Young Foundation, UK*

and

Madeleine Gabriel *Principal Researcher, Nesta, UK*

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

Editorial matter, introduction and selection © Nesta 2015 Individual chapters © Contributors 2015 Foreword © Geoff Mulgan 2015 Conclusion © Roberto Mangabeira Unger 2015

The authors have asserted their rights to be identifi ed as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

#### Open access:

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

First published 2015 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN

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Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin's Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data New frontiers in social innovation research / [edited by] Alex Nicholls, Julie Simon, Madeleine Gabriel. pages cm

1. Social entrepreneurship. 2. Social change. 3. Diffusion of innovations— Social aspects. 4. Technological innovations—Social aspects. I. Nicholls, Alex. HD60.N436 2015 338'.064—dc23<PHONE_NUMBER>

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*For Samuel, Harriet and Juliette: the kids are alright (AN) For Guy, with love (MG) To NMS, always (JS)*

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# Contents

# List of Figures and Tables

# **Figures**

# **Tables**

# **OPEN**

# Foreword: The Study of Social Innovation – Theory, Practice and Progress

### **Introduction**

How should social innovation be researched? And what should be the relationship between research and action? This piece discusses what can be known about social innovation, how research agendas could evolve and how the study of social innovation fits into the broader picture of research on innovation.

#### **Definitions, boundaries and character**

The first challenge for any researcher is to define their boundaries – what is the object of study, and with what disciplines is this object to be understood? Much of the discussion of social innovation is vague, and there are many competing definitions of social innovation that attempt to delineate a field of study (Jenson and Harrison, 2013). Some present it as simply a new term for the study of non-profits; for others it can encompass almost anything from new types of democracy to the design of products for poor consumers. The definition that I have found more useful describes the field as concerned with innovations that are social in both their ends and their means (Young Foundation, 2012). While this leaves some fuzzy edges, it captures the dual interest of the field in, on the one hand, finding better ways to meet human needs and, on the other, its interest in strengthening bonds of commitment and solidarity. It is a definition which also deliberately internalises the unavoidable tensions that are always present in any kind of social change, since all societies argue about what counts as social good or social value.

The next challenge is to be clear what kind of field this is. For now, at least, it is not a discipline, a profession, a functional domain or the preserve of any particular organisational form. Instead social innovation can best be understood as a loose movement founded on ideas: above all the idea that in the right circumstances people can make, shape and design their world, and more specifically, that they can invent and grow new forms of social organisation. That idea is not new and there has been writing on social innovation for nearly two centuries (Mulgan, 2012). But the spread of education and democracy, and new generations of technology, have made it much more feasible for people to take control of their lives and their world, and have helped turn the deeply democratic ideal of self-government into a more practical possibility.

The appeal of this idea explains why social innovation has attracted interest and adherents. The last five years have seen the spread of social innovation funds (from Australia and Hong Kong to France), incubators (many hundreds), offices (from the White House to City Halls), Mayors (such as the 'Social Innovation Mayor' in Seoul, whose work is explored by Kim *et al.* in this volume), global networks (such as SIX, the Social Innovation Exchange), and prizes (from China to the European Union). Corporate social innovation is beginning to displace corporate social responsibility within some large firms such as Danone or BASF and, as a sign of the times, several of the biggest consultancies have set up social innovation teams.1

This evolution of the practice of social innovation has happened ahead of research and theory, but the same was true of the two great systems of innovation that modernity has brought to maturity. One is the science system, which now employs millions of people, and is rich in money, institutions, rules and procedures. It is a system richly funded by governments, that is truly global in scale, linked by common procedures and values, and animated by the confidence which comes from a century or more of often dramatic success. It is also a field with plenty of theory – but nearly all the theory came after the practice rather than before it.2 The other great innovation system can be found in business, which takes new technologies and ideas to market, and which is even richer in money, institutions, procedures and ideas. That system too has won extraordinary prestige, and combines some elements of openness with the strict hierarchy of the large corporation and the worlds of finance. Here, too, theory followed practice in the form of economic theories of intellectual property, public goods and rates of return. Both systems share a commitment to exploration and discovery, measurement of what works and replication of successes.3

Social innovation by contrast is far less developed. It happens all the time, but with only a small fraction of the massive public subsidy that accrues to science, or the dense web of research, practice and profit that sustains innovation in business.

#### **Linking research to practice and mission: the epistemologies of social innovation**

So how should social innovation be studied? If social innovation rests on an idea – an idea about possibility – rather than being a field with clearly defined boundaries, and if its practice inevitably leads theory, then the study of social innovation can never be just a detached, empirical object of analysis within social science.

That social innovation is rooted both in practice and in a mission to tap creative potential makes some things easier and some more difficult. The part that is easier is the connection to practice. The intellectual task of understanding intersects with the work of thousands of people around the world trying to do social innovation, to develop ideas, put them into practice and find out if they are working. How can collective intelligence be harnessed to make the most of tools like crowd sourcing platforms, prizes or accelerators? How can citizens be involved in generating ideas? How can social innovation reconfigure the boundaries between state, market and civil society? How should governments internalise innovation?

To the extent that the research agenda is intertwined with an emerging field of practice, the test of research is whether it is useful, relevant and applicable, and whether the practitioners can, in fact, make use of its insights. All of this is a kind of 'craft' knowledge, grounded in practice, and then fed back into that practice. In terms of epistemology, this connects to the philosophical approaches of pragmatism in its 19th century sense, the pragmatism of John Dewey and William James, which argued that ideas are not things waiting out there to be discovered but rather tools that people devise to cope with the world as they find it (Menand, 1997). Most of those ideas are socially generated – not coming from individuals alone – and, because they are provisional responses to particular situations, their survival depends not on their immutability, but on their adaptability (see Howaldt *et al.* in this volume).

The study of social innovation has drawn on many existing disciplines, from sociology to psychology, regional studies to economics. But the pragmatist approach suggests that it should be thought of as more than a new topic for existing disciplines, or as a new theme for interdisciplinary research. Instead it should be understood as a praxis, a body of knowledge closely tied into evolving practice (Menand, 1997). In this respect its epistemology is perhaps less different from other areas of social science than it first appears. Macroeconomics mainly grew up as a set of craft tools to help governments manage economies before and after the Second World War. Of course there was plenty of theory, and over time the field became ever more theoretical (DeVroey and Malgrange, 2011). But many of its leading thinkers saw it primarily as a way to help practitioners running government economic departments. In the natural sciences, most of the big 20th-century theoretical breakthroughs in physics, chemistry and biology did not arise in a detached ivory tower but as responses to the practical problems of the real world, and much of the theoretical distinction between basic and applied research, which became institutionally embodied in the late 20th century, misread that history – a point eloquently made in Jon Agar's recent book (2013).

Yet to describe the study of social innovation as a craft knowledge is not to imply any less need for research rigour. There is still a need for falsifiable hypotheses – the more clear-cut, or surprising, the better. There is certainly a need for data – time series data on the growth or decay of social organisations, their contribution to GDP, their social make-up, their geography, and so on – and we should hope that over the next decade social innovation can begin to catch up with the rapid progress being made in the statistical study of other fields of innovation. Examples of this include the progress being made in measuring intangibles, the pioneering work on measuring the creative economy (Bakhshi *et al.*, 2012) and the use of web-scraping and other tools to show economic phenomena before they have been captured by official statistics (Bakhshi and Mateos-Garcia, 2012).

That sort of rigour is bound to take research away from the immediate concerns of practitioners, and so a balance needs to be struck. The Italian philosopher and politician Antonio Gramsci (1979) famously commented that we should cultivate pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will; perhaps what we most need here is to combine enthusiasm of the spirit and scepticism of the intellect.

Striking that balance is a challenge both for the field and for individuals. Many individuals researching social innovation are also practitioners and activists; they are advocates as well as scholars, immersed in the mission as well as the measurement and analysis. This is bound to create tensions. But again, it is not so different from other areas of social science – from late 19th-century sociology to late 20th-century rational choice economics, many of the most apparently detached intellectuals were also in truth advocates for new ways of seeing the world and new ways of acting on it. Joseph Schumpeter, for example, was the finance minister of Austria in 1919 (Backhaus, 2003).

#### **Social innovation and social change**

The harder task for social innovation research is to understand the place of social innovation in much bigger processes of social change. From where do ideas come? Why do some flourish and others wither away?

One root of much social innovation is the experience or observation of pain and suffering, and the experience and observation of how people respond with love, care, learning, empathy or cure. Out of that observation grew attempts to replicate these things – the love, care or learning – in institutional form or with technologies. Another root of social innovation is the exploration of evolutions or 'adjacent possibles' (Kauffman, 1995). Once you have a school or a hospital or a micro-credit organisation, then other innovations flow logically from these – extending, adapting or combining them in new ways. A third root is ideas – the idea of a world based on cooperation, rights or ecological sustainability turns something good in everyday experience into a universal.

An interesting avenue for research could be to track important innovations upstream – to map their aetiology. But with any idea it is then important to understand under what conditions it might spread or scale. Previous research has examined the dynamics of scaling: the interaction of 'effective demand' and 'effective supply' and the various organisational options ranging from growth through licensing, franchising, federations to takeovers (Mulgan *et al.*, 2007). But what makes the 'effective demand' possible in the first place? It could be argued that some ideas in particular periods align with the dominant technologies and political systems (Wyatt, 2007). Welfare states and trade union rights seem to fit better with mass, industrialised societies, collaborative consumption with pervasive internet technologies and mobile consumers. Another lens emphasises national or cultural particularities, which may explain why some kinds of micro-credit worked in Bangladesh but not India, why some models of mentoring worked in the United States and not the United Kingdom, or some models of childcare worked in Denmark but not Spain (Ghysels, 2004). Clearly systems create constraints, nested structures of environment, culture and policy that shape what does, and does not, spread.

Yet there is a risk in all of this analysis to see too much order. As Calvino explained in his letters (2013): 'imagining the world as a "system", as a negative, hostile system (a symptom that is typical of schizophrenia) prevents any opposition to it except in an irrational, self-destructive raptus; whereas it is a correct principle of method to deny that what one is fighting can be a system, in order to distinguish its components, contradictions, loopholes, and to defeat it bit by bit'. This is the constant challenge with systems thinking – how to see the interconnections between things without becoming intellectually overwhelmed, and trapped by them into a fatalism which presumes that change is impossible.

This is likely to become more, not less important, in the years ahead. Many social innovators soon come to understand that lasting change depends on changing whole systems, not just individual services. Major advances in primary healthcare, education or jobs depend on how systems are rewired, often with shifts in power from existing incumbents to new players, or to citizens themselves. Some of the most important changes have depended on the interaction of social movements and campaigns, new laws and regulations, new technologies and business models. The movement to large-scale recycling is a good example of this (Murray *et al.*, 2010). Yet traditional disciplines struggle to make sense of these complex processes, and we badly need better theoretical methods – combining quantitative and qualitative analysis – as well as better tools (Mulgan, 2013).

As the field of social innovation grows, and becomes more subtle and complex, there is a need to be patient. It is at least fifty years since the innovation studies field took shape, led by such great figures as Richard Nelson, Christopher Freeman, Carlota Perez and Giovanni Dosi. Yet it is, in some respects, heartening to know that after half a century there are few agreed definitions of innovation; few agreed metrics (and some certainty that the dominant ones, like patents and R&D spend, are misleading); and little confidence about what works when it comes to policy. Indeed one of the conclusions of a major review of global innovation policy evidence was that relatively little is known, and that how policy is implemented matters as much as the policy itself (Rigby and Ramlogan, 2012).

#### **Four arguments that could help advance the field**

While we should be patient, we also need better arguments. All disciplines and fields advance faster with the help of passionate, serious and uncomfortable debates than through cosy consensus. Here, four arguments could be particularly productive in sharpening thought.

The first is about investment and social investment. There is now great interest in the application of investment methods from venture capital and private equity to social problems, and many claims that these can deliver better – or, at least, different – social outcomes than traditional grant funding or government action. While these claims are plausible, there is as yet little hard evidence to substantiate them one way or the other. There is limited research on the financial returns of the social sector across major economies, and surprisingly flimsy evidence on the long-term returns of other asset classes. Stock markets do seem to rise several percentage points each year on average. But many are surprised to discover that the average returns to venture capital are barely 3% in the United States and 0% in the United Kingdom; that private equity appears to offer no advantages once tax subsidies are discounted; and that, of course, many banks have achieved negative returns in real terms in recent years (Lerner *et al.*, 2011). So, there is a need for sceptics arguing that social impact investment is all hype and others countering them, but with facts, analysis and evidence rather than just assertion.

A second useful argument would be a variant of the one happening in innovation studies: namely, is innovation slowing down or speeding up? Some writers, including Tyler Cowen (2011) and Peter Thiel (2011), have claimed that innovation has dramatically slowed down compared to twenty or thirty years ago, which is why people travel in 1960s aeroplanes, why we do not have jet packs on our backs, and why the pharmaceutical industry struggles to develop useful new drugs. Others say that the world is in a golden age of perpetual digital invention, benefitting from a flood of new ideas in fields like genomics and new materials. Elements of both arguments seem to be right. But we need an equivalent dialogue on social innovation: are things speeding up or slowing down, and is there a coherent model for understanding under what conditions social innovation might be expected to speed up or slow down?

A third, even more useful, argument would be about which innovations are good and which are bad. This is a glaring gap in innovation studies and, indeed, in most of economics. History shows that most innovations create value for some people and destroy it for others. The car was good for drivers, but not much good for pedestrians who did not own a car. A high proportion of financial innovations in the last twenty years destroyed more value than they created – Paul Volcker, Head of the Federal Reserve, said he could only think of one financial innovation that created any public benefit and that was the ATM (WSJ, 2009).  A similar pattern of value creation and destruction applies to social innovations – and even very benign ones like hospices or kindergartens may put some people out of work. Yet most of the analytic tools for understanding innovation have no way of distinguishing one from another. Book after book and journal after journal on innovation studies explore the strategies of innovation agencies but do not even hint that it matters to know whether value is being destroyed or created. Even the fashionable analyses of disruptive innovation are wholly silent on these issues – assuming that disruption is basically a good thing – even though a moment's reflection shows that many innovations are disruptive in bad ways, destroying more than they create. If mainstream innovation lacks the intellectual resources to think these things through, then it is all the more important that there are passionate, empirical and rigorous arguments about these issues in social innovation: both for the sake of understanding and to ensure that more funding goes to the good innovations than the bad ones.

The fourth argument needs to be about politics. During the 1990s and 2000s some of the leading organisations involved in the fields of social entrepreneurship did their best to push politics and argument out. They also airbrushed out the role of social movements, contention and mobilisation. A generous explanation would be that they were seeking to pull in the broadest possible support. A less generous explanation might point to dominance by club class elites, management consultancies and billionaire funders, who were hardly likely to favour the more radical end of social innovation. Either way what was left behind was often rather bland and unconvincing, sometimes implying that lone social entrepreneurs, philanthropists or businesses, or individual technological advances, could solve the world's social problems singlehandedly. A more plausible view sees social innovation as unavoidably bound up with politics. Grassroots innovators can come up with novel ideas, but they lack the power to generalise them. Conversely, governments and political parties may have the power to legislate new rights but usually lack the means to create and experiment. In practice there is complementarity, and wise innovators work as much to influence the conditions in which their ideas may spread as they work to spread their idea. That complementary interaction of grassroots innovation and top-down policy certainly happened during past periods of social reform. But parties and governments often struggle to hear what is happening on the ground, and those on the ground often struggle to understand how the world looks to a minister or a global agency. That is why we need more research on the alignment and misalignment of social innovation and structural reform, and a more honest debate about the limits of each.

#### **Social innovation and the pursuit of human potential**

Finally, if the deep underlying idea of social innovation is an optimistic one about human potential to govern individual lives and design the world, then there is a need to understand how societies can make the most of that potential.

For a long time, a common theme of conservative politics was the claim that it was inherently impossible for more than a tiny elite to rule, create and think. It was argued that attempts to widen participation were bound to be futile. In the modern era, by contrast, the democratic argument has become mainstream: parties of all stripes purport to want to amplify human creativity and potential.

Yet even within social innovation the arguments are not clear-cut. Social entrepreneurship organisation Ashoka has suggested that there is only one serious social entrepreneur per ten million of population (Ashoka, 2012). Acknowledging the role of individual agency is in some respects a healthy counter to the 20th century's love of big organisations and big systems.

But history shows that it is wrong to presume a fixed, and limited, stock of human social ingenuity. Estonia with a population of not much more than a million is bursting with innovative creativity in the economy and technology. Iceland, with not many more than 300,000 people, has been a powerhouse of new ideas. Meanwhile places that were thought to be lacking in creativity have within the space of a generation transformed themselves – Taiwan and South Korea are impressive recent examples which confirm that in the right circumstances there is dramatically more human potential for innovation than might be imagined. Some of the recent innovations in social innovation have aimed to tap this latent potential: crowd-sourcing of ideas, large-scale deliberative processes and inducement prizes draw on the notion that the best ideas may come from anyone, anywhere (see, e.g., Tjornbo in this volume).

The field of social innovation often claims, whether implicitly or explicitly, that better ways of tapping human creative potential are not only good for social health, but also likely to support economic growth. But we lack hard evidence, and, for now, there are no ways of mapping or measuring this innovative potential or the extent to which it is made use of. This could become an important theme for research, and it is not so hard to imagine how it could be done, for example surveying the depth and breadth of public involvement in creating ideas and putting them into effect.

Going in this direction would help the field of social innovation move from being a marginal topic, concerned with the management of NGOs, to a much more central one, concerned with how governments, foundations or businesses could truly maximise the creative potential of their societies.

> *Geoff Mulgan Chief Executive of Nesta*

### **Notes**

#### **References**

Agar, J. (2013) *Science in the 20th Century and Beyond*. Cambridge: Polity Press.

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

# Acknowledgements

We would like to thank and acknowledge all those who helped in the development and production of this collection. First, our thanks to The Rockefeller Foundation and Nesta who jointly funded the production of this book and made it possible to publish it Open Access. We would also like to thank all the staff at The Rockefeller Foundation, Nesta, The Young Foundation, Glasgow Caledonian University and SIX who were instrumental in organising the Social Frontiers Conference in 2013, which provided the starting point for this collection. We would like to thank the Advisory Panel that selected papers to be presented at the conference, including Josef Hochgerner, Agnes Hubert, Karen Miller, Maria Elisa Bernal, Taco Brandsen, Zhou Hongyun, Antonella Noya, Peter Droell, Johanna Mair, Jeremy Millard, Jürgen Howaldt, Alex Nicholls, Geoff Mulgan and Robin Murray. Special thanks goes to Kippy Joseph, Jo Casebourne, Laura Bunt, Anna Davies, Rachel Schon, Katherine Stevenson, Sophie Reynolds and Mark Anderson, without whom this collection would not have been possible. We would also like to thank the editorial and commissioning team at Palgrave Macmillan for their help and support, especially Philippa Grand, Emily Russell and Judith Allan.

Early versions of chapters 1–10 and the conclusion are available as working papers at http://www.scribd.com/Nesta\_uk.

# Notes on Contributors

# **Editors**

**Madeleine Gabriel** is a principal researcher at Nesta, United Kingdom, focusing on social and public innovation. She is the author of *Making It Big: Strategies for Scaling Social Innovations* and co-author of *People Helping People: the Future of Public Services* (both 2014). She is working on the European Commission–funded TRANSITION project, which is testing and developing methods for incubating social innovation. Before joining Nesta, Gabriel was Head of Impact, Research and Evaluation at UnLtd, The Foundation for Social Entrepreneurs, United Kingdom, where she developed new ways of measuring the organisation's impact and led its programme of research on social entrepreneurship. Her background is in evaluation and she has led or participated in several major programme evaluations for public sector organisations in the United Kingdom, including the evaluation of the Social Enterprise Investment Fund for the Department of Health.

**Alex Nicholls** is the first tenured Professor of Social Entrepreneurship appointed at the University of Oxford, United Kingdom. In 2010, Nicholls edited a special edition of *Entrepreneurship, Theory and Practice*  on social entrepreneurship – the first time a top tier management journal had recognised the topic in this way. He is General Editor of the Skoll Working Papers series and Editor of the *Journal of Social Entrepreneurship*. Nicholls is the co-author of the most widely cited book on Fair Trade (with Charlotte Opal, 2005) and the co-editor of the first scholarly collection of papers on social innovation (with Alex Murdock, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). He is also editor of a collection of key papers on social entrepreneurship (2008) and another on social finance (2015). He has held lectureships at a wide variety of academic institutions including University of Toronto, Leeds Metropolitan University, University of Surrey and Aston Business School.

**Julie Simon** is Research Programme Lead at The Young Foundation, United Kingdom, specialising in social innovation. She has authored several major reports on social innovation as part of the European Commission–funded project TEPSIE (2011–2014), which explored the theoretical, empirical and policy foundations of social innovation in Europe. Earlier, Simon worked on the Social Innovator Series which analysed ways of designing, developing and growing social innovations. She co-authored the *Study on Social Innovation* for the Bureau of European Policy Advisors (2010), *The Open Book of Social Innovation* (2010), *Social Venturing* (2009) and *How to Innovate: The Tools for Social Innovation* (2008). Before working at The Young Foundation Simon worked on education policy at the Social Market Foundation, where she co-authored *Fade or Flourish: How Primary Schools Can Build on Children's Early Progress* (2008).

# **Contributors**

**Marie J. Bouchard** is a professor at Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada, and a regular member of the Centre de Recherche sur les Innovations Sociales (CRISES), Canada. She was a Canada Research Chair on the Social Economy from 2003 to 2013 and codirector of the Community Housing research partnership of the Community University Research Alliance (CURA) on the Social Economy, Canada, from 2000 to 2011. Her recent publications include *Se loger autrement au Québec* (2008), *The Worth of the Social Economy* (2010) and *Innovations in the Social Economy, The Québec Experience* (2013).

**Louise Briand** is a professor in the Department of Social Sciences at Université du Québec en Outaouais, Canada, and a regular member of the Centre de Recherche sur les Innovations Sociales (CRISES), Canada. Her main research interests concern intra- and inter-organizational control and new organizational forms in private and social economy sectors. Her work focuses on managerial innovations that represent, for the workers, new modes of control and surveillance.

**Carla Cipolla** has been involved since 2004 in projects on design for social innovation in Europe, Africa and in Brazil where she is now Associate Professor of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, UFRJ – Coppe. She coordinates the DESIS Lab at UFRJ – Coppe, which is one of the founding members of the DESIS Network (Design for Social Innovation and Sustainability). In 2004, she started a research and design activity that relates social innovations with the service sector. Social innovations are analysed in terms of new service models (based on interpersonal relations and collaborative qualities) that are able to offer alternatives to a delivery approach to services.

**Adalbert Evers** is Professor for Comparative Health and Social Policy at the Justus-Liebig-University in Giessen (emeritus since autumn 2013) and is a senior fellow at the Centre for Social Investment (CSI) at the University of Heidelberg, both Germany. His research interests are located in the field of social policy and social services. He has published extensively, spoken at conferences and done policy consultancy for national and international bodies on issues of civil society, the third sector and volunteering as well as democracy and governance issues in relation to social policy and the social services. He can be reached at<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
**Benjamin Ewert** completed his PhD in social science at Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, Germany. From 2010 to 2014 he was a research fellow with the EU project 'Welfare Innovation at the Local Level in favour of Cohesion' (WILCO). At present, he works for an interdisciplinary project on integrated palliative care at University Hospital Bonn, Germany. Ewert's main research interests are social innovations, comparative welfare studies, health politics and integrated care. He can be reached at<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
**Sunkyung Han** is Co-Founder of C. (Cdot). Before founding C., she coordinated research projects on community issues and urban regeneration as well as social innovation in general while working at the Hope Institute, South Korea. She was also in charge of international projects, creating a platform for Asian Social Innovators, ANIS (Asia NGO Innovation Summit, 2010–2012) and organising several international conferences in terms of social innovation. She is a member of the inaugural committee of GSEA (Global Social Economy Association) and an Asia Region Coordinator.

**Jürgen Howaldt** is Director of Sozialforschungsstelle Dortmund and Professor at the Faculty of Economics and Social Sciences at TU Dortmund University, Germany. A world-renowned expert in the field of social innovation, he has written numerous books and articles on the issue. He has advised German and European policy makers and presented his ideas worldwide. Howaldt is also Affiliate of Social Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research Centre (SIERC) at Massey University, New Zealand, and Co-founder of the board of the European School of Social Innovation.

**Jane Jenson** was awarded the Canada Research Chair in Citizenship and Governance at the Université de Montréal, Canada, in 2001, where she is Professor of Political Science. She has also been Senior Fellow of the Successful Societies programme of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, Canada, since 2004. Her research focuses on comparative social policy and particularly on the politics of the creation and diffusion of social policy concepts such as 'social cohesion', 'social investment' and 'social innovation'.

**Jungwon Kim** is Co-Founder of Spread*i*, a UK-based enterprise, founded in 2013, which aims to spread ideas, innovation and inspiration across borders, especially between Europe and Asia. Its main emphasis lies on introducing and exchanging expertise and innovators through digital stories, study trips, research, workshops and seminars. Kim acts as an adviser to Korean and UK professionals in the social innovation sector and has been actively involved in social innovation research projects focusing on cases in Korea, Thailand, Japan, China, India and the United Kingdom.

**Juan-Luis Klein** is a full professor in the Department of Geography at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM), Canada. Since 2009, he has been the director of the Centre de Recherche sur l'Innovation Sociale (CRISES), Canada. He is also in charge of the series on *Géographie contemporaine* and has authored and co-authored several books, chapters and articles on the topics of economic geography, local development and socio-territorial innovation.

**Ralf Kopp** is a senior researcher at Sozialforschungsstelle Dortmund, TU Dortmund University, Germany. He is a member of the management board and coordinator of the research field organisation and networks. He works in application-orientated transdisciplinary projects about open innovation and learning networks. Against this background he is engaged in the development of a theory of social innovation.

**Benoît Lévesque** is Professor Emeritus at Université du Québec à Montréal and Associate Professor at École Nationale d'Administration Publique, Canada. He is Co-founder of the Centre de Recherche sur les Innovations Sociales (CRISES) and of the Community-University Research Alliance (CURA) on the Social Economy, Canada. He was President of CIRIEC-Canada from 1996 to 2002 and President of the Scientific Council of CIRIEC International from 2002 to 2010. He is Co-director of the collection *Social Economy and Public Economy* and has authored numerous books and papers on social economy and social innovations.

**David Longtin** holds a master's degree in political science from Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada, and is a research assistant at the Centre de Recherche sur les Innovations Sociales (CRISES), Canada. His research interests focus on social imaginaries, citizenship studies, theoretical and empirical perspectives on democratization and collective actions in Latin America. Since 2009, he has contributed to different partnership research projects of CRISES on philanthropy and social innovation in Quebec. Since 2011, he has been part of the research team building the CRISES database on social innovation.

**Ezio Manzini** has been working in the field of design for sustainability for more than two decades. Recently, he has focussed his interests on social innovation and started, and currently coordinates, DESIS: an international network on design for social innovation and sustainability (http:// www.desis-network.org). He has worked at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy, throughout his professional life and is Honorary Guest Professor at the Tongji University, China, at the Jiangnan University, China, and, since 2014, at the University of the Arts London, United Kingdom.

**Katharine McGowan** is a post-doctoral fellow at the Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience, Canada, attached to a project that partners the University of Waterloo with representatives from the community, business and government of the Regional Municipality of Wood Buffalo, Alberta, Canada. McGowan brings her interest in social innovation and resilience to this initiative, researching how social change partnerships work.

**Patricia Melo** is an industrial engineer with a master's degree in Management and Innovation from the Universidade do Rio de Janeiro, UFRJ – COPPE, Brazil. She is a member of the DESIS Lab at UFRJ – Coppe and has developed research on corporate social responsibility and social innovation.

**Geoff Mulgan** has been Chief Executive of Nesta, the United Kingdom's innovation foundation, since 2011. Previously he was Chief Executive of The Young Foundation, United Kingdom, which became a leading centre for social innovation. Between 1997 and 2004 Mulgan had various roles in the UK government, including Director of the Government's Strategy Unit and Head of Policy in the Prime Minister's office. His most recent book, *The Locust and the Bee*, was published in 2013.

**Ahyoung Park** is Co-Founder of C. (Cdot) based in Seoul, South Korea. C. promotes social innovation by connecting knowledge and experience among people pursuing social change in Asia and other countries. It provides services to encourage international exchange and build relationships that facilitate collaboration and cooperation, including running international conferences and study tours, providing training, and coordinating and advising organisations in terms of building international networks. Park was previously a researcher at the Center for Social Economy of the Hope Institute, a civic think and do tank in Seoul, Korea. Park has conducted various projects in terms of community regeneration, community business, social enterprise incubation and consulting in partnership with local governments and social organisations.

**Mathieu Pelletier** is a postdoctoral researcher at Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada. As Banting Fellow, he has co-founded and is the coordinator of the Observatory on urban and peri-urban conflicts. His work concerns urban studies, decision-making processes and geographical information science. His recent publications focus on urban conflicts and citizen participation (Géocarrefour, 2014) and the location of urban conflicts regarding the social and environmental characteristics of territories (Applied Spatial Analysis and Policy, 2010; Canadian Journal of Regional Science, 2013).

**Sojung Rim** is Co-Founder of Spread*i*. She also works at Social Innovation Exchange (SIX), United Kingdom, where she coordinates SIX's annual flagship event, SIX Summer Schools. She has previously worked at The Young Foundation, United Kingdom, on a global study geared at surfacing and spreading social innovation methods, with deeper regional studies in Africa and Asia. Rim has also worked at the Hope Institute, a social innovation centre in South Korea.

**Michael Schwarz** is a sociologist. From 2005 to 2012 he worked as senior researcher and project manager at Sozialforschungstelle Dortmund, TU Dortmund University, Germany, in the fields of organisations, networks, innovation and climate change with special interests in pathways to sustainable development. During this time he made an important contribution to the development of social innovations as a research subject and analytic category, on which he has written numerous books and articles. Since 2012 he has worked freelance, focusing mainly on the social-theoretical foundation of social innovation as a driving force of transformative social change.

**Lina Sonne** heads Okapi's Mumbai office and leads research on inclusive innovation and entrepreneurship across South Asia. She previously managed research at Intellecap, India, on urban poverty and social entrepreneurship and was editor of Searchlight South Asia, a monthly newsletter on urban poverty. Before that, Sonne was assistant professor, Inclusive Innovation and Entrepreneurship, at the newly started Azim Premji University, India, where she helped set up MA in Development Studies.

**Eva Sørensen** is Professor of Public Administration and Democracy at Department of Society and Globalization, Roskilde University, Denmark and Professor II at the University of Nordland in Bodø, Norway. She is Vice-director of the Centre for Democratic Network Governance and Director of the 'CLIPS' research project on collaborative innovation in the public sector. Her main research interests are new forms of public governance and their impact on role perceptions among citizens, public administrators, public employees and politicians. She is studying the role of politicians in policy and service innovation.

**Ola Tjornbo** is McC onnell Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience, Canada. His work focuses on the transformation of complex social-ecological systems and social media. Tjornbo's work combines governance theory and complexity theory to help us understand how we can better manage challenges such as climate change and sustainability. He also uses social innovation theory to explore how our governance systems can change and adapt to a changing external environment and what role social media might play in such transformations.

**Jacob Torfing** is Professor of Politics and Institutions in the Department of Society and Globalization, Roskilde University, Denmark, and Professor II at the University of Nordland in Bodø, Norway. He is Director of the Centre for Democratic Network Governance and Vice-Director of the large-scale strategic research project on Collaborative Innovation in the Public Sector (CLIPS). His research interests include networks, public innovation, governance reform and local democracy.

**Catherine Trudelle** is a professor in the Department of Geography at Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada, and a regular member of the Centre de Recherche sur les Innovations Sociales (CRISES), Canada. She is Canada Research Chair in Socioterritorial Conflict and Local Governance. She co-founded the Observatory on urban and peri-urban conflicts (www.observatoireconflits.org/). She is also Fulbright Fellow. Her work focuses on urban conflicts, social mobilisation, urban democracy and humanisation of cities. In the recent years she has published papers on urban conflicts and local governance.

**Roberto Mangabeira Unger** is a philosopher, a social and legal theorist, and a politician. Among his books are: *Passion: An Essay on Personality*, *False Necessity*, *What Should Legal Analysis Become*, *Democracy Realized*, *The Left Alternative*, *The Self Awakened* and *The Religion of the Future*. He served as Minister of Strategic Affairs in the administration of President Lula in Brazil.

**Frances Westley** is the JW McConnell Chair in Social Innovation at the University of Waterloo, Canada, and leads the Waterloo Institute for Social Innovation and Resilience. In this capacity, she is one of the principal leads in a Canada-wide initiative in social innovation, Social Innovation Generation (SiG).

# **OPEN**

# Introduction: Dimensions of Social Innovation

*Alex Nicholls, Julie Simon and Madeleine Gabriel*

#### **Introduction**

Social innovation is not new, but it appears to be entering a new phase – a phase in which it is increasingly seen as offering solutions not just to localised problems but to more systemic and structural issues. Nevertheless, the growing set of examples and attendant discourses and logics of social innovation have yet to coalesce around a single, common definition, a set of standards or performance measures or an agreed policy agenda. Partly, this is the consequence of the 'liability of newness' experienced by all new fields of action: namely, they lack the legitimacy needed to support significant investment or research. It may also be because the range and variety of action that constitutes social innovation today defies simple categorisation. Indeed, this fluidity and diversity may be seen as one of the field's great strengths in terms of addressing complex social problems and challenges. So, as yet, there is no established paradigm of social innovation (see also Nicholls, 2010a).

However, there are strong signs that interest is growing in this institutional space where innovative thinking and models can address both problems of social welfare efficiency or distribution and imbalances and inequalities in social structures and relations. Moreover, interest in this field appears to cut across governments, civil society and even mainstream businesses and investors. It has also become a topic for scholarly enquiry and research (see e.g., Nicholls and Murdock, 2012). This book aims to explore the multiple dimensions of social innovation – both theoretically and empirically – in order to advance research and contribute to shaping the formation of its boundaries and to advancing a wider recognition of the opportunities and challenges of this new phase.

In particular, this volume aims to challenge some of the emerging normative assumptions about the 'promise of social innovation', namely a general acceptance that it is an unproblematic and consistently positive phenomenon without drawbacks or unintended consequences. Thus, this collection explores the implications of social innovation in cross-sector collaborations and hybrid forms, across several contexts and in multiple country settings to highlight a range of issues across social innovation models. The research presented here deliberately ranges across different socio-structural levels and units of analysis – from micro to macro – in order to offer multiple insights into the various contexts in which social innovation can operate effectively. Much of the work here also has strong policy implications: by codifying and analysing practice, its objective is to inform future policy making in social innovation across countries. This book also aims to contribute to the critical field-building project of social innovation that is already underway across a range of researchers and institutions by augmenting the existing body of knowledge on this subject with work on new trends and case examples. In the process, the hope is that the work published here will also support the building of a community of researchers looking at social innovation by adding its own, modest legitimacy to working on this subject. The contents and structure of this volume are considered in more detail below.

### **Definitions**

At its simplest, social innovation can be seen as 'new ideas that address unmet social needs – and that work' (Mulgan *et al.*, 2007, p. 2). In practice, social innovations can take the form of specific ideas, actions, frames, models, systems, processes, services, rules and regulations as well as new organisational forms. However, more specifically, there are two interlinked conceptualisations of social innovation, focused on either new social *processes* or new social *outputs and outcomes*. The first emphasises changes in social relations and often has a focus on rebalancing power disparities of economic inequalities in society (see Moulaert *et al.*, 2014a). For example, Mumford (2002, p. 253) suggested that:

Social innovation refers to the generation and implementation of new ideas about how people should organize interpersonal activities, or social interactions, to meet one or more common goals.

Westley and Antadze (2010, p. 2) subsequently expanded upon this by noting that:

Social innovation is a complex process of introducing new products, processes or programs that profoundly change the basic routines, resource and authority flows, or beliefs of the social system in which the innovation occurs. Such successful social innovations have durability and broad impact.

Second, social innovation can be seen as the answer to social market failures in the provision of vital public goods. This is reflected in the OECD's definition of social innovation, which also includes a reference to the process dimensions of social innovation (2011, p. 1):

Social innovation is distinct from economic innovation because it is not about introducing new types of production or exploiting new markets in itself but is about satisfying new needs not provided by the market (even if markets intervene later) or creating new, more satisfactory ways of insertion in terms of giving people a place and a role in production.

In addition to these two meta-definitions, three levels of social innovation can be identified (see Table I.1). First, there is *incremental* innovation in goods and services to address social need more effectively or efficiently. This is the objective of many successful charities and notfor-profits, as well as some so-called 'Bottom of the Pyramid' (Prahalad, 2006) commercial firms. From this perspective, social innovation may simply be a good business opportunity. Second, there is *institutional* innovation that aims to harness or retool existing social and economic structures to generate new social value and outcomes. Examples such as Fair Trade (Nicholls and Opal, 2005) or mobile banking typically exploit or modify existing market structures to deliver new or additional social value. Finally, *disruptive* social innovation aims at systems change. This is typically the realm of social movements and self-consciously 'political' actors, groups and networks aiming to change power relations, alter social hierarchies and reframe issues to the benefit of otherwise disenfranchised groups. Disruptive social innovation can be characterised by structured mass participation in political parties or formal membership schemes of social movements, on the one hand, or loose coalitions of individuals and interests united by an evanescent issue or technology such as social media, on the other. Policy entrepreneurs from within

*Table I.1* Levels of social innovation

*Source*: Nicholls and Murdock (2012).

*Table I.2* Dimensions of social innovation

*Source*: Nicholls and Murdock (2012).

state structures can also drive disruptive social innovation by focussing on reforming democracy and enlarging or deepening citizens' roles within it.

Social innovation can also be defined in terms of the level of its action or impact from the individual to the systems level (micro-, meso- or macrolevel). Such levels or dimensions can be mapped against the two main definitions of social innovation focused either on new social processes or on new social outcomes (see Table I.2). These differing levels of impact point to the complexity of performance measurement on social innovation and emphasise the need for clarity about the unit of impact of a social innovation.

Social innovation can also be considered in the context of the more institutionalised fields of social entrepreneurship (Dees, 1998; Nicholls, 2006) and social enterprise (Alter, 2006; Nyssens, 2006). In this setting, social innovation can be seen as the biggest field of action encompassing any new idea or model that addresses a social (or environmental) need. Social entrepreneurship can, then, be seen as a subset of social innovation – the organisational enactment of social innovation ideas and models.

Finally, drawing upon theory from design thinking, Murray *et al.* (2010) set out the key stages of the development of a social innovation as a nonlinear process. This model is characterised by a series of key inflection points where the development of an innovation moves first from prompts and proposals to prototyping (an important part of the design process), then to sustainability and, finally, to scale.

It should also be acknowledged that social innovation is not, in and of itself, a socially positive thing. Social innovation may have a 'dark side'. This could be evidenced in several ways:

It is well understood within innovation studies that innovations will create value for some and destroy it for others. This underlies Schumpeter's (1942) notion of 'creative destruction'. In the context of social innovation, however, the idea that social innovations might create winners and losers is rarely, if ever, articulated. Phills *et al.* (2008) appeared to recognise the potential for a dark side of social innovation in a definition that emphasises *improvement* rather than *change* as a central feature:

A novel solution to a social problem that is more effective, efficient, sustainable, or just than existing solutions and for which the value created accrues primarily to society as a whole rather than private individuals. (p. 36)

Moreover, this conceptualisation also highlights a potential bifurcation of value creation and value appropriation within social innovation that renders the interests of the individual (social) innovator secondary to wider social value creation (see Nicholls, 2010b, for a similar argument in the context of social investment).

#### 6 *Alex Nicholls, Julie Simon and Madeleine Gabriel*

Clearly, social innovation is a complex and multi-faceted institutional space that is still subject to competing discourses and definitions. Moreover, as is illustrated in this collection, social innovation can have a 'dark side' that challenges normative assumptions that (social) innovation is always positive (i.e., improvement rather than just change). It is important, therefore, to be aware that social innovation from one stakeholder perspective may look and feel very different from another – social benefit is always contingent. As such, in terms of this collection, social innovation can be seen as:

Varying levels of deliberative novelty that bring about change and that aim to address suboptimal issues in the production, availability, and consumption of public goods defined as that which is broadly of societal benefit within a particular normative and culturally contingent context.

# **Drivers**

As Moulaert *et al.* (2014b) noted:

Socially innovative actions, strategies, practices and processes arise whenever problems of poverty, exclusion, segregation and deprivation or opportunities for improving living conditions cannot find satisfactory solutions in the 'institutionalized field' of public or private action. (p. 2)

As such the growth of interest in social innovation as a field or set of tools and models reflects the failure – for at least some sections of society – of established systems (technology, markets, policy, governance, etc.) to deliver well-being and economic prosperity. This can be seen, fundamentally, as a distribution problem in terms of both mainstream innovation policy and democratic reform. Social innovation can be viewed, therefore, as partly a response to patterns of modernity that have marginalised certain populations and that see the individual citizen as essentially an economic/consuming actor, not as an active participant in collective decision-making. From this perspective social innovation is a sense-making process that, first, frames key issues and then proposes alternative worldviews (functioning much like the classic social movement: see Davis *et al.*, 2005). This reading of the drivers of social innovation emphasises addressing sub-optimal configurations of social relations via new models of empowerment, engagement or political mobilisation.

Of course, social innovation is also driven by simple welfare need. The increasing challenges of global warming, growing inequality (if not absolute poverty), demographics (notably a growing ageing population), migration, pandemics and terrorism have been compounded by the effective nationalisation by governments of the private sector financial crisis after 2008. Thus, the age of public sector austerity will likely stretch forward into the 2020s and beyond in many developed countries and this will continue to severely constrain welfare budgets. As a consequence, in both developed and developing country contexts, there will be a need for social innovation to address shortfalls and market failures in the provision of basic, universal, welfare services.1

One account of the increased focus on social innovation in recent years casts it as a response to an acceleration of global crises and so-called 'wicked problems' characterised by multiple and contradictory analyses and diagnoses (Rittel and Webber, 1973; Rayner, 2006; Mulgan *et al.*, 2007; Murray *et al.*, 2010), such as: climate change; social breakdown; rising life expectancy and associated health and social care costs; growing cultural diversity within and across countries; growing inequality; rising incidences of chronic long-term conditions and pandemics; behavioural problems associated with the 'challenge of affluence' (Offer, 2006); difficult transitions to adulthood; endemic reductions in individual happiness and indices of well-being. The rise of social innovation also demonstrates a collapse in trust in the status quo – as established models and social relations have increasingly failed to deliver well-being for many. In this context, intractable problems are seen as highlighting the failure of conventional solutions and established paradigms, entrenched in institutional settings across all three conventional sectors of society. This is evident through private sector market failures, public sector siloed thinking and a lack of scale in and fragmentation across civil society.

An important subset of these 'wicked problems' concerns welfare reform. After World War Two a new model of welfare provision emerged across many developed economies with the state delivering universal public services largely free at the point of access, funded by taxation and compulsory individual 'national' insurance. The centrepiece of many welfare states has been the development of powerful public healthcare systems. However, demographic and societal changes combined with the economic realities of rising welfare costs and worsening public finances have led to radical innovation in the provision of welfare goods and services in recent years (Leadbeater, 1997). In many cases this has involved a retreat from centralised state-led provision and an engagement with new 'partnership' models involving both the private and civil society sectors. A key objective has been increased economic efficiency, but there has also been a realisation that innovation and reform offer the opportunity to improve the effectiveness of services.2 For example, in both the United Kingdom and elsewhere there has been a clear move in public policy towards enabling greater 'choice' and control for the recipient of welfare services (Bartlett, 2009a and 2009b). Indeed, policy reform offers an important mechanism by which social innovation can be both incubated and enacted as a part of 'reinventing government' (Osborne and Gaebler, 1992). At the same time, there has been a crisis in the legitimacy of the democratic process in many developed countries with the consequence that social innovation is also being used as a set of processes to improve citizen engagement within the policy-making process.

In developing country contexts, public welfare has typically not developed in this way. Large welfare states are not present here. Nevertheless, social innovation models of mixed provision, co-creation and deep citizen participation in welfare – that are becoming entrenched in the developed nations – are also playing a role in emergent welfare states elsewhere (Nicholls, 2013). This is discussed further below.

An alternative view of this new phase of social innovation sees it as a necessary (but not always automatic) companion to rapid technological change and economic innovation (Hämäläinen and Heiskala, 2007). This conceptualisation presents social innovation as a process of reshaping social relations to maximise productivity and economic development, often framed by the (perhaps optimistic) assumption that the benefits of these changes will be shared equally across society. Such a reading also suggests that social entrepreneurship represents the reconciliation of an historical division between private and public sector mechanisms of productivity growth (Drayton, 2002). These approaches are at a systems level of analysis that relates most clearly to a disruptive vision of social innovation.

Common to all these drivers are a series of complex and multifaceted social contexts that drive innovation not only in processes and outcomes but also, increasingly, as boundary-blurring activity across the conventional sectors of society. As Murray *et al.* (2010) wrote:

Social innovation doesn't have fixed boundaries: it happens in all sectors, public, non-profit and private. Indeed, much of the most creative action is happening at the boundaries between sectors. (p. 3)

Each of the three sectors of society – civil society, public and private – has its own internal logic of action and defining features. Taken together, these three ideal-type sectors can be conceptualised as a triad represented in stability as a triangle. Between each of the three ideal-type points lies a spectrum of hybrid institutions and organisations that represent sites for social innovation as a boundary-blurring activity (see Figure I.1). Thus, between the civil society sector and the private sector are social enterprises that combine business logics and models with social objectives and ownership structures (Alter, 2006). Some examples along this spectrum will be closer to the logic of business (i.e., businesses with a social purpose: see also Corporate Social Innovation, Moss Kanter, 1999) and some to that of civil society (i.e., not-for-profit organisations that have an earned income stream). In the spectrum between the private and public sector ideal types are hybrids such as public–private partnerships that aim to provide new models of welfare provision outside of, but in tandem with, the state (Bovaird, 2006). Finally, between the state and civil society ideal types lies the 'shadow state' in which civil society organisations function as a surrogate state, providing welfare where there is a public sector market failure. For example, in Bangladesh, BRAC and the network of Grameen organisations act as quasi-state providers of education, health, employment and

financial services across the country in and around institutional voids at the policy and market levels (Mair and Marti, 2009).

There are multiple, often sector-specific, drivers behind the growing relevance of social innovation across sectors. For the private commercial sector, there is an increasing recognition of social innovation as offering a model for new roles of business in society (e.g., the 'Shared Value' model, Porter and Kramer, 2012). For the state, social innovation links with traditions of welfare reform based on increased efficiency and effectiveness, also reflecting a move from a focus on New Public Management to Public Value and, more recently, New Public Governance. It may also challenge the governance status quo in societies by aiming to transform the power structures across social relations that allocate goods and services ineffectively or unequally. For civil society, social innovation may involve both internal processes of organisational change (such as new legal forms, collaborations and income strategies) and novelty in external outputs and outcomes (such as new products and services).

# **Research themes**

To date, the research literature that focuses on social innovation specifically is limited, albeit growing. A review of this body of work reveals three clusters of research themes. Each is now considered in turn.

#### **Innovation in social relations**

The largest and most well-developed body of work on social innovation specifically focuses on innovation that addresses various dimensions of changes in social relations. This literature can be subdivided into five categories of scholarship:

#### **Innovation to address social market failures**

This stream of work relates to the outcome-driven model of social innovation already discussed above and focuses on innovation as the means by which new products and services can be provided to underserved market segments. At the macro level, this includes the mechanisms by which new markets are created in weak institutional spaces or to address market failures. The latter is conceived of as encompassing failures not only in commercial markets but also in public sector 'markets', where the state fails to provide public goods, and civil society 'markets', where charities, not-for-profits and NGOs fail to provide effective goods and services to their beneficiaries (Nicholls, 2006). High-profile examples include developments focused on the Bottom of the Pyramid (Prahalad, 2006) or frugal innovation (Jugaad) models (Zeschky *et al.*, 2011). However, while such failures typically provide innovation opportunities, they can also offer challenges in terms of reconciling potentially competing institutional logics (Battilana and Dorado, 2010).

#### **Resilience theory**

A third strand of social innovation theory has emerged recently focusing on its relationship with the overall sustainability and, particularly, the resilience of the larger ecosystem within which it evolves. The overall resilience of a system may be examined through the lens of the adaptive cycle, which is graphically represented by an infinity loop encompassing four phases: release, reorganisation, exploitation and conservation. The exploitation and conservation phases in the 'front' loop represent periods of growth and resource accumulation, where change is routine and almost always adaptive, while the release and reorganisation phases in the 'back' loop can represent the introduction of novelty, either transformative (radical) or adaptive change, and renewal of the system. The back loop, therefore, represents a precarious moment from the point of view of whether the system remains stable, adapting and learning but not transforming, or whether it is pushed close to a threshold that tips the system into a new stability domain. The new domain may share characteristics with the old stability domain but will have radically different feedback loops, and hence different relationships between the phases (Moore and Westley, 2011). Resilience theory offers a systems-level model of the emergence and dissemination of patterns of social innovation.

That social innovation occurs in multiple contexts of praxis serves to reinforce the need for theoretical particularity in the analysis and presentation of the phenomenon (Moulaert *et al.*, 2014a). Thus, each case of social innovation in healthcare, education, economic development, agriculture, urban development or governance and political transformation will need its own epistemology and set of boundaries and logics if it is to be understood clearly. This is, of course, a methodological, as well as theoretical, challenge for researchers.

#### **Objectives of this book**

This collection aims to contribute to the small but growing research literature on social innovation. In particular, it attempts to challenge some of the emerging normative assumptions concerning the 'promise' of social innovation via critical analyses, extending and testing relevant theory, and via new empirical contributions. One important contribution of this volume is to test the assumption that social innovation is somehow inherently 'good' or socially positive in all contexts. As noted above, it is easy to imagine a 'dark side' to social innovation (as highlighted here by McGowan and Westley). However, even self-evidently positive social innovation may not benefit all relevant stakeholders equally and may, indeed, create negative effects for some. Moreover, the disruptive effects of some social innovation may undermine important institutional norms whilst still delivering substantial benefits to target populations. For example, some analyses of the role of social innovation in welfare services delivery would emphasise that this simultaneously undermines the roles and responsibilities of the state (and, therefore, citizens' democratic rights) as it delivers measurably positive benefits to target populations (see Evers and Ewert here). Unger also notes the need for social innovation to 'aim high' by acknowledging – and confronting – political and power issues across societies. The danger, otherwise, is that social innovation becomes absorbed into existing systems – tamed into irrelevance.

This collection also intends to help build a global community of researchers in social innovation by bringing together a range of perspectives and examples from around the world. The authors included here range across a variety of disciplines – management, political science, not-for-profit studies, sociology and economics – making this volume an avowedly multi-disciplinary endeavour. This is not only intellectually interesting but also reflects the reality of praxis in social innovation that is often characterised by cross-sector collaboration and organisational hybridity.

This book offers examples and insights from multiple geographical contexts and reflects many different cognitive frames, discourses and debates concerning the nature and enactment of social innovation. The innovation within this book itself lies in its presentation of new cases, new theories and new methodologies allied to different levels and units of analysis across its chapters.

Finally, this collection hopes to contribute meaningfully to emergent policy debates across countries concerning the role and functioning of social innovation across the commercial, not-for-profit and public sectors (and in the blurred institutional spaces between them). The contributions here serve to codify and analyse practice in a way that can inform better public policy decision-making. Academic research can play a significant role in this regard since it often explores models and issues that sit ahead of current policy debates and agendas. It is the ambition of this collection to offer such insights.

#### **Key themes**

The various contributions in this collection have a number of common themes and topics.

First, this volume offers a number of new observations concerning the *practice and process of researching social innovation*. A foundational question asked here is: Is there a need for specific theories of social innovation or is social innovation simply a phenomenon that can be observed and made sense of using existing theoretical frameworks? Moreover, if the latter is true, then which disciplines best suit this analytic purpose? Partly to answer this, the chapters in this volume offer a rich and broad range of theoretical approaches to framing and analysing social innovation. They also touch on several important methodological issues. There are three chapters that present detailed case material from different countries (Brazil, South Korea and India): each offers new and rich empirical evidence of social innovation in context.

Second, and perhaps unsurprisingly, there is a clear focus on exploring the *nature of social innovation*. Overall, the research presented here situates social innovation as a 'quasi-concept' characterised by its fluidity in terms of its meanings and attendant discourses. This, of course, is a contingent effect of the widely observed tendency of social innovation to occupy hybrid institutional spaces and organisational forms. Specifically, the approaches to the nature of social innovation set out here include discussions of definitions with particular emphasis on the implications of social innovation at different socio-structural levels and at different stages of the innovation lifecycle from emergence to institutionalisation and, ultimately, entropy and re-invigoration as a new cycle begins (within the resilience model). The analysis of lifecycle issues also focuses on process questions around the dissemination, diffusion, growth and scaling of social innovation in various contexts.

Several chapters explore the nature of social innovation in terms of the complex interactions between individual actors and the systems in which they are located – this work reflects the central sociological debates concerning the roles of agency and structure in determining the shape and functioning of social action. This book also highlights examples of cross- or multi-sector collaboration (often in network settings) as defining features of successful social innovation. Research here demonstrates how successful examples of cross-sector partnerships also need to be carefully calibrated to their socio-cultural contexts.

A final focus of this collection is on the *effects of social innovation*. Within this topic there is a strong interest in democratic and public sector reform. This is manifest in social innovation aimed at citizen engagement and improved political accountability and transparency, on the one hand, and examples of innovative public service reform, on the other. The former is also analysed in terms of practical examples of innovations in governance and accountability mechanisms and models. Connected to these themes is research here that explores social innovation directed towards disrupting the (unjust) status quo of power structures via an explicit social change agenda. This theme also acknowledges the significance of community-level innovation and action. Another research focus examines how social innovation shapes, is shaped by and interacts with market structures and models. This set of work lies in stark contrast to the public sector focus noted elsewhere and provides a useful counterpoint to it, enriching the overall scope and argument of the book as a whole.

#### **Structure of the book**

The collection opens with some reflections by Mulgan on the future of social innovation research. He argues that social innovation rests on an idea about possibility, rather than being a field with clearly defined boundaries. As such, social innovation research cannot be simply a detached, empirical social science; it is inevitable – and healthy – that research is coupled with practice.

After this introduction, the book is divided into three parts: researching social innovation; blurring boundaries and reconfiguring relations; and producing social innovation through new forms of collaboration.

Part I examines a range of issues concerning the research of social innovation. This section explores new methodological approaches that can help to understand the roles of particular social innovation actors and to identify broader patterns and trends regarding the relationship between social innovation, social change and societal transformation.

The theoretical foundations of the concept of social innovation remain relatively weak and much research in this area is descriptive or evaluative. To further develop the theory underpinning social innovation research, one potential approach is to revisit the works of social theorists whose frameworks and models can help to make sense of critical issues within social innovation discourses. In Chapter 1, Howaldt, Kopp and Schwarz revisit the work of Gabriel Tarde and make a case for using his social theory in developing a theoretically grounded concept of social innovation. Tarde's basic idea is to explain social change 'from the bottom up'. Countless and nameless inventions and discoveries change society and its practices through equally countless acts of imitation, and only as a result do they become a true social phenomenon. By identifying the practices and laws of imitation as central to social innovation and social change, the authors propose shifts of perspective relevant to contemporary social innovation policy and discussions about the diffusion of social innovations.

Another approach to researching social innovation, exemplified in Chapter 2, is the use of comparative historical case studies. McGowan and Westley introduce a theoretical and methodological framework based on three propositions: first, that new social phenomena create the opportunity for changes to social relations and structures by enabling glimpses into the 'adjacent possible'; second, that agents' behaviour and roles within social innovation can be divided into three categories – poets, debaters and designers – whose efforts are complementary; and finally, that to achieve broad, lasting change, the innovation in question must cross multiple scales – from the niche (micro) level to the (macro) landscape level. The authors explore these frameworks through a case study on the emergence of the intelligence test. This illustrates the three elements within the authors' theoretical framework and also shows how social innovation is culturally contingent. The ideas that inspired the development of the intelligence test, such as Social Darwinism, are now widely viewed as profoundly perverse.

In 2011, the Centre de recherche sur les innovations sociales (Center for Research on Social Innovations – CRISES) started to build a database of social innovations. In Chapter 3, Bouchard *et al.* examine the uses and the challenges of building such a database. Since research on social innovation is generally conducted through case studies, it is difficult to carry out macro-sociological analysis of the social transformations that accompany these innovations, and results cannot be generalised. The database of social innovations aims to fill this gap and to enable the longitudinal, sectoral and spatial analysis of social innovation in the context of Quebec. The process of building a database represents an innovative approach to the research of social innovation, and the authors point to a number of methodological, theoretical and epistemological challenges associated with such a task.

Part II explores some of the ways in which social innovations reconfigure relations between civil society, the state and the market. Indeed, the boundaries between these sectors are becoming increasingly porous and one of the striking features of social innovations is their ability to combine the traditionally disparate logics of the private, public and civil society sectors.

In Chapter 4, Jenson examines some of the varied meanings of the 'quasi-concept' of social innovation, and argues that one of its major contributions is to provide a novel way to reorganise market relations in the post-neoliberal world. The 'welfare diamond' is a heuristic device that illustrates the mixed sources of well-being, which include the market, the state, the family and the community. Each is a potential source of well-being. Increasing reliance on social entrepreneurs and social enterprises to achieve social innovations in social policy implies a reconceptualisation of relations within the welfare diamond, often by explicitly exposing and developing a reliance on non-market dimensions (such as community engagement and public policy) in the processes of market making and in quasi-markets.

Chapter 5, by Evers and Ewert, looks at the welfare diamond from a different perspective. The chapter describes and analyses approaches and instruments used in a range of innovative welfare projects from twenty cities and ten countries across Europe. Analysing these reveals recurring approaches and instruments in relation to various dimensions of welfare systems. The chapter reflects on the relationship between social innovation in the welfare field and welfare reform, and raises challenges for both. The economic precariousness caused by flexible labour markets, together with growing levels of in-work poverty, high levels of unemployment and squeezes to welfare entitlements and pensions, probably creates more significant social problems than could ever be addressed through socially innovative services that empower citizens and communities. This raises questions about the ability of social innovation to live up to its 'promise', and shows that, in order for social innovations to have real impact, engaging with political processes is essential.

Chapter 6 provides empirical evidence of the ways in which social innovations reconfigure market relations and blur boundaries between sectors, in this case between the market and civil society. Cipolla, Melo and Manzini describe the development and emergence of a new type of 'collaborative service' in a pacified favela in Rio de Janeiro. The pacification process enabled a local energy company to start offering services in the favela, but residents found it difficult to pay their bills. To overcome these challenges, the energy company developed 'Light Recicla', a service that reduced residents' electricity bills by exchanging recyclable materials for energy credits. Based on this case study, the authors discuss the possibility of building a new type of service based on vertical, experiential interactions between service providers and service users in informal settlements such as favelas.

While Part II explores issues about *structure* in generating social innovation, Part III examines some of the key issues around *agency*. In particular, it looks at the roles played by social innovation actors – such as social entrepreneurs, citizens and public sector managers – and explores how these roles can be strengthened in order to support the generation of social innovation. The chapters in this section underline the importance of collaboration in producing social innovation, even while some also highlight the roles of key individuals in the process, such as Mayor Park in Seoul. In this way, the chapters in this section echo arguments made by Howaldt *et al.* and McGowan and Westley, which emphasise the roles of different actors within the social innovation process.

In Chapter 7, Sørensen and Torfing argue that multi-actor collaboration in networks, partnerships and inter-organisational teams can spur public innovation. They argue that the principles of New Public Management are giving way to 'New Public Governance', and that the enhancement of collaborative innovation has now become a key aspiration of many public organisations around the world. However, collaborative and innovative processes are difficult to trigger and sustain without proper innovation management and a supportive cultural and institutional environment. Arguing strongly that innovation is produced through collaboration and not through the actions of 'heroic individuals', the authors describe the roles for public innovation managers that are necessary to enhance innovation through collaboration.

In Chapter 8, Han, Kim, Rim and Park provide an empirical case study from Seoul. Led by Mayor Park, a famous social innovator, Seoul Metropolitan Government has developed various communication channels, both online and offline, which have enabled new forms of consultation and engagement between the city administration and citizens. The chapter outlines three communication tools and programmes that reflect the current administration's approach and values, and presents a case study of a particular challenge that the city government solved through engaging with citizens. New communication tools often have a limited reach, and the methods currently being used only contribute to solving a limited range of social problems. Nevertheless, Seoul Metropolitan Government's approach offers valuable lessons to other cities that are ambitiously planning to initiate and drive social innovation.

In Chapter 9, Tjornbo examines whether the wisdom of crowds can be harnessed to generate social innovation. The development of modern information and communication technologies has led to a renewed interest in the phenomenon of collective intelligence, defined here as the capacity to mobilise and coordinate the knowledge, skills and creativity possessed by large groups of individuals, and combine them into a greater whole. Social innovation is deeply reliant on the capacity to combine the ideas, knowledge and resources possessed by disparate groups, something collective intelligence can do well. However, it is also clear that collective intelligence has serious limitations when it comes to dealing with complex problems that are politically contested and require careful coordination. This chapter provides a framework for examining how collective intelligence might support social innovation and explores three existing collective intelligence platforms that have promoted social innovation: Innocentive, Open Source Ecology and TED.

Chapter 10 examines how successful social entrepreneurs use networks to build their businesses. Focusing on social entrepreneurs as a particular sub-group of social innovators, Sonne maps the individual networks of three innovative social enterprises in India. Analysing these networks helps to improve understanding of to whom social entrepreneurs turn for access to knowledge and financial and non-financial support in order to innovate, build and grow their businesses and develop social capital. The author also explores the way in which social entrepreneurs build the relationships that form the basis of their networks and the ways in which important networks change over time.

In the book's conclusion, Roberto Mangabeira Unger offers a manifesto for the social innovation movement: he explores the impulses driving the movement and argues for a view of what its agenda and methods can and should be. In this 'maximalist' view, the task of the social innovation movement is to challenge the worldwide 'dictatorship of no alternatives' by addressing 'the whole of society, of its institutional arrangements, and of its dominant forms of consciousness'. The best way to carry out this task is to take small-scale experimental initiatives that both mark a path for society and represent first steps for treading it. For Unger, the overriding mission of the social innovation movement is the enhancement of agency – our power, as individuals and as collectivities, to reshape our world. It is to help create a society of innovators.

#### **Conclusions**

This chapter has set the context for the remainder of the volume and has summarised the key contributions of the research featured here. However, there are several important and interesting topics of relevance to social innovation that would benefit from future research. Six such topics are sketched out below.

An important feature of social innovation that has sometimes been overlooked in the literature to date is political disruption. The social movements literature suggests that truly systemic change only comes about through struggle and changing the dominant cognitive frames that frame social issues. Such activity typically comes up against strong vested interests and can encounter (sometimes violent) resistance. As a consequence, the politicisation of social innovation research offers an important new lens through which systemic change can be understood: recognising the political dimension of social innovation is not merely a research opportunity, but it also raises significant practical questions and challenges. Political action often prompts a reaction and can lead to institutional confrontation or even danger. Further, when social innovation addresses public welfare issues or aims to drive political change, it typically does so as private action that lacks any formal democratic legitimacy. This is particularly problematic in cases where social innovation acts as a 'shadow state' substituting for what would otherwise be the welfare responsibilities of the elected state. Such a democratic deficit challenges rights-based models of citizens' relationship to their government. There is also the more general issue of who is included in, and who is excluded from, social innovation impacts.

A second issue concerns the public legitimacy of social innovation. Many social innovations that aim to address institutional voids may initially lack legitimacy to key populations. This is because they often take the form of interventions that combine otherwise distinct institutional logics and models of action in innovative forms and that challenge normative notions of the roles and responsibilities of the discrete sectors. Such hybrid forms of action typically blend the logics and rationales of two or more established sectors to build new organisational structures (i.e., 'social' business), processes (i.e., work integration models) or goods and services (i.e., user-led welfare models) that correspond to complex sets of needs and demands in late modern societies better than conventional interventions do. The logics and rationales of action of each conventional sector are quite different and even contradictory at the normative level. As a consequence, the public legitimacy of social innovation (at both normative and cognitive levels: see Suchman, 1995) can often be compromised, with new models variously seen as attempts to privatise the social, dismantle the state or undermine civil society (Nicholls and Cho, 2006). The reaction to the social enterprise/social business hybrid model within social innovation has been particularly hostile since this challenges fundamental principles of the state and civil society as not-for-profit sectors in many countries. Such loss of public legitimacy can have serious consequences in terms of access to resources, market competitiveness, policy support and staff recruitment.

Third, there are challenges in scaling up social innovation. The stated objective of much social innovation is to bring about systemic change. However, genuine systems change is a very ambitious objective and typically requires a combination of scale, geographical spread and political support. Bloom and Chatterji (2009) acknowledged these factors when they established the SCALERS model as a guide to key activities needed to achieve scale in social innovation, notably in terms of staffing, communicating, alliance building, lobbying, earnings generation, replicating and stimulating market forces. Elsewhere research has focused on the institutional, rather than organisational, aspects of achieving scale, particularly in terms of building social innovation 'ecosystems' (Bloom and Dees, 2008). However, there is relatively little evidence as yet of social innovation delivering systems change without government support – which begs important questions about the public–private dimensions of scaling social innovation.

Fourth, social innovation is often limited by access to market – or even discretionary – commercial finance at the start-up and growth phase (Nicholls, 2010b). There are several reasons for this. First, as was noted above, social innovation often occupies hybrid institutional spaces that span the logics of the state and the for-profit and not-for-profit sectors. This creates difficulties in terms of assessing risk and return within conventional financial modelling. Furthermore, given its explicit social focus, social innovation 'ventures' may not aim at maximising their financial bottom line, focusing instead on creating 'blended value' (Emerson, 2003) that combines social and financial performance. A third challenge is investor exit – there is currently no fully functioning secondary market in which social innovation investments can be realised. The emergence of an impact investing market (O'Donohoe *et al.*, 2010) over recent years may partly address this capital gap – but it seems likely that, going forward, public and philanthropic finance will remain important to develop and grow social innovation.

Fifth, there are, as yet, no agreed measurement mechanisms or standard units of analysis for social innovation impact and performance. Welfare economics and the large range of bespoke social impact measurement approaches developed within the not-for-profit or social entrepreneurship sectors offer a set of models that can be used in different contexts, but no dominant standard has emerged (Mulgan, 2010; Ebrahim and Rangan, 2010). As a consequence, exploring the comparative performance of social innovation remains a challenge. This has profound implications for access to capital and policy making.

Related to the problems of measuring social innovation impact is a sixth challenge. As has already been suggested, social innovation may have problematic unintended or accidental consequences or externalities. There are four issues to be considered here. First, social innovation can have negative social effects by excluding some groups from the focus of its provision of social goods and services or its campaigns for social change. Second, another unintended set of consequences can arise from different framings or perceptions of the hybrid nature of social innovations that blend social and financial objectives. From one point of view such activities are exploitative and represent the 'privatisation' of the social, as critiques of the high interest rates offered by many micro-finance organisations have pointed out. Third, social innovation could be hijacked for socially divisive or destructive objectives and intentions, for example by secret societies or extreme political parties. Finally, social innovation can achieve perverse effects in cases of operational failure (e.g., Tracey and Jarvis, 2006). Since social innovation is often expressed organisationally in the form of innovative start-ups in weak institutional spaces, it is inherently risky. As a result, it is reasonable to expect that much social innovation will fail, with potentially damaging effects for vulnerable populations.

Finally, it is important to note that social innovation is often highly contingent and contextually sensitive. It will therefore look quite different in different countries. Thus, outside of the United States and Europe, social innovation has very different political-economic contexts (see Kerlin, 2009). For example, in the transition countries of Eastern Europe after the fall of communism, weak market structures, significant injections of international aid and a rejection of centralised organisational forms led to the development of social innovation focused on creating small businesses that rejected the co-operative and mutual form due to cultural-political reasons of history. In Latin America, after the financial crisis of the late 1990s, market, state and international aid structures were severely weakened. In this context, social innovation evolved, first, as a mechanism of social solidarity built from the grass roots up (Klein, 2002) and, then, as mechanisms to rebuild jobs and regenerate economies (see, e.g., NESsT, 2005). In Africa, social innovation emerged at the intersection of state and market failures (sometimes bordering on actual collapse) and was often driven by high levels of extreme poverty and large inflows of international development aid. Particularly significant here was the provision of microcredit for small businesses, as well as the emergence of innovative organisations in health, education and farming. More recently, there has been a strong focus on environmentally sustainable businesses and enterprises, particularly in green technology, often funded by international investors. Finally, in parts of South and South East Asia – notably Bangladesh and India – social innovation has emerged to address a combination of minimalist state welfare structures and growing welfare failures. This did not reflect state failure or welfare crises on an African scale, but rather was the product of a context in which the relationship between the private individual and the state was often remote and problematic. In the case of the Grameen Bank and BRAC in Bangladesh, for example, social innovation reached a national scale, with these two organisations functioning as a shadow state delivering financial services, employment, health and education to many more citizens than the elected state.

Social innovation offers an exciting space for research and debate, but it also offers the potential to bring about substantive changes in the alignment of resources, policy and societal structures to address the major issues of modernity across many different countries. This is very much a dynamic project – a constantly renewing work-in-progress that has an inbuilt self-reflexivity and self-critique – working across many sectors (and their interfaces) and at many socio-structural levels. The empirical project to test and map the impact and effectiveness of social innovation is only at an early stage of development, but a better understanding of the trends, blueprints, challenges and opportunities is emerging. It is to this vibrant and international conversation that this book hopes to contribute.

#### **Notes**

#### **References**

Alter, K. (2006) 'Social Enterprise Models and Their Mission and Money Relationships', in A. Nicholls (ed.), *Social Entrepreneurship. New Models of Sustainable Social Change*. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 205–32.

Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. To view

a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

# **Part I Researching Social Innovation**

# **OPEN**

# Social Innovations as Drivers of Social Change – Exploring Tarde's Contribution to Social Innovation Theory Building

*Jürgen Howaldt, Ralf Kopp and Michael Schwarz*

# **Introduction**

In the context of seemingly intractable social challenges such as climate change, environmental destruction, youth unemployment and social exclusion, social innovation has emerged as a potentially sustainable solution. It is often assumed that social innovation can lead to social change (see, for example, Cooperrider and Pasmore, 1991; Mulgan *et al.*, 2007; BEPA, 2010). However, the relationship between social innovation and social change remains underexplored:

Rather than being used as a specifically defined specialist term with its own definable area of studies, social innovation is used more as a kind of descriptive metaphor in the context of phenomena of real world problems, social change, and the modernisation of society. (Howaldt and Schwarz, 2010, p. 49)

There is still no consistent or coherent concept of social innovation grounded in social theory that is suitable for empirical research (Mulgan, 2012; European Commission, 2013, p. 26). The result is 'an incoherent body of knowledge on social innovation with the consequence that there is a lack of clarity of the concept of social innovation' (Rüede and Lurtz, 2012, p. 2). The scientific discussion on social innovation is polarised between an actor-centred, individualistic, attitude-orientated perspective on the one hand and an implicit, structuralist perspective on the other. Social innovations are either attributed to individualistic acts or considered as deterministic results of external context (Cajaiba-Santana, 2014; European Commission, 2013). Given the fact that social theory does not yet play an important role in social innovation research (Howaldt and Schwarz, 2010; Mulgan, 2012; Moulaert *et al.*, 2013; European Commission, 2013), its possible contributions are worthy of exploration.

In light of the increasing importance of social innovation, this chapter focuses on a conception of social innovation that is grounded in social theory, as a precondition for the development of an integrated theory of socio-technological innovation in which social innovation is more than a mere appendage, side-effect and result of technical innovation. Against this background, social innovation is defined here as a new combination1 or configuration of practices in areas of social action, prompted by certain actors or constellations of actors with the ultimate goal of coping better with needs and problems than is possible by using existing practices (Howaldt and Schwarz, 2010, p. 54). An innovation is, therefore, 'social' to the extent that it varies social action and is socially accepted and diffused in society (be it throughout society, through large parts of it or only in certain societal sub-areas). Depending on the circumstances of social change, interests, policies and power, social ideas and successfully implemented social innovations may be transformed and, ultimately, institutionalised as regular social practice, that is, made routine. From this perspective, social innovations can be seen as actions that spread through society as a result of imitation, bringing about social change: a 'process of change in the social structure of a society in its constitutive institutions, cultural patterns, associated social actions and conscious awareness' (Zapf, 2003, p. 427). Only by taking into account the unique properties and specifications of social innovation will it be possible to understand the systemic connection and interdependence of social and technological innovation processes to analyse the relationship between social innovation and social change.

This chapter aims to outline how Gabriel Tarde's social theory can be of benefit in developing a theoretically grounded concept of social innovation and how it can be reinterpreted in terms of practice theory.2 In comparison with action, system and structural theories, this perspective on social innovation is based upon a modified understanding of the 'social' as social practices and their reconfiguration as a core element of social innovation (Shove *et al.*, 2012). Practice theories overcome the dichotomies between structure and action, subject and object, rule and application, society and the individual, that arbitrarily define micro and macro levels or sociological 'reality rules' (Latour and Lépinay, 2010, p. 114). Tarde focuses on social practices as the central theoretical and analytical category and last unit of sociality. The social world is, therefore, composed of specific, although interdependent practices: practices of governance; practices of organising; practices of partnership; practices of negotiations; practices of self (Reckwitz, 2003); practices of comfort, cleanliness and convenience (Shove, 2003); practices of working and nurturing (Hargraves *et al.*, 2011) and practices of consumption (Brand, 2011; Warde, 2005).

By defining social innovation 'as a new combination or configuration of practices', an approach can be found in recent social theory that focuses on the social practices and dynamics of change. In the conclusion of their paper analysing definitions of social innovation from various disciplines, Rüede and Lurtz (2012) recognised the potential for future research in practice theory. As part of the 'practice turn' in the field of social sciences (Schatzki *et al.*, 2001; Reckwitz, 2003), practice theories – for example those of Bourdieu, Giddens and Latour – can be seen as important components of a theory of social innovation (Howaldt and Schwarz, 2010), essential for analysing 'the dynamics of social practice' (Shove *et al.*, 2012). In this sense, social innovation can be:

Interpreted as a process of collective creation in which the members of a certain collective unit learn, invent and lay out new rules for the social game of collaboration and of conflict or, in a word, a new social **practice**, and in this process they acquire the necessary cognitive, rational and organizational skills. (Crozier and Friedberg, 1993, p. 19) [emphasis added]

Social innovation encompasses new practices (concepts, policy instruments, new forms of cooperation and organisation), methods, processes and regulations that are developed and/or adopted by citizens, customers and politicians, in order to meet social demands and to resolve societal challenges in a better way than existing practices.

This chapter starts with a short review of Ogburn's concept of social change, which laid the foundation for a specialised sociology of change. Ogburn's concept provided important input into a better understanding of technological *and* social innovation on the one hand and social change on the other. However, it is only through recourse to the social theory of Tarde that the opportunities arising from a sociology of innovation for the analysis of social change become apparent. This is the subject of the following section. For Tarde, social macrophenomena such as social structures, systems and social change are 'easy to describe, but hard to explain, because the true complexity resides in the microphenomena' (Gilgenmann, 2010, p. 2). His basic idea was to explain social change from a 'post-foundationalism' (Marchart, 2013) perspective and not objectivistically (like Durkheim) from the top down, in terms of social facts and structures (Gilgenmann, 2010, p. 7), or subjectivistically, following the approaches of social phenomenology, symbolic interaction or ethno-methodology (Marchart, 2013, p. 45). Recourse to Tarde helps to overcome the restriction of the concept of innovation to purely economic aspects. Taking his micro sociological approach as a starting point, key implications are outlined in the final section of this chapter. This analysis allows a theoretically grounded understanding of social innovation on which innovation policy can be built.

### **Theoretical foundations for social innovation**

Theories of social change have been at the core of sociology since its beginning. So far, however, no consistent theory has emerged. In particular, theory has difficulties with social change that is not continuous and linear (Weymann, 1998, p. 17). In so far as sociological theories deal with processes of change, they do so almost universally from the perspective of the reproduction, and not the transformation of social order. Social change in the sense of fundamental transformations at the macro (structural) level – that function as 'mega trends' or as a sequence of phases separated by (epochal) upheavals – belongs to the field of the sociological diagnosis of epochs. This can manage completely without social theory and at the same time is often mistaken for it (Osrecki, 2011).

Social innovation, as an analytical category, has remained, at best, a secondary topic in both classical and modern social theory – often in relation to concepts such as social differentiation and social integration, social order and social development, modernisation and transformation. The social sciences refuse to a large extent to 'present and list as social innovations the relevant social changes' that they have discovered and studied (Rammert, 2010, p. 26).3

Ogburn theorised the basis for a comprehensive theory of innovation. Ogburn made 'cultural lag' – the difference in the time it takes for the comparatively slow, non-material culture to catch up with the faster developing material culture – his analytical starting point. He systematically differentiated between technological and social innovations (and inventions) as critical factors in social change. He also explained that the use of the term 'inventions' is not restricted to the technological but can also be used to include 'social inventions', such as the League of Nations:

Invention is defined as a combination of existing and known elements of culture, material and/or non-material, or a modification of one to form a new one. […] By inventions we do not mean only the basic or important inventions, but the minor ones and the improvements. Inventions, then, are the evidence on which we base our observations of social evolution. (Ogburn, 1969, p. 56 ff.)

Thus, Ogburn was convinced that in the interplay between invention, accumulation, exchange and adaptation, he had discovered the basic elements of 'cultural development' and hence – like Darwin for biological evolution – had developed a model to explain social evolution.

Although Ogburn's approach allowed for the analysis of social innovations as drivers of social change, the debate in the field of the sociology of technology concerning the relationship between technological and social innovation and social change has tended to conceptualise the former as independent from technological development.4 Ogburn started by exploring the interrelationship between the 'material' and 'non-material elements of culture'. He assigned to 'innovations in the non-material field' the character of 'secondary changes' in the sense of an 'adaptation to a change in the material field' (Ogburn, 1969). This was further conceptualised as an 'invention in the field of technology or a discovery in applied science' that can have an extraordinarily large effect 'with great likelihood in changes in other cultural fields' or even in the 'formation of completely new social institutions' (ibid., p. 67). In this original interpretation, social change was understood as a process of the diffusion of innovations and, hence, as the imitation or adoption of a (technological or social) invention by others – sometimes as an emergent innovation process in which social innovations are primarily ascribed the function of a (delayed) adaptation in the sense of a 'cultural lag' (Ogburn, 1969, p. 64).

At the same time, it is overlooked that in his later work, Ogburn referred to an important misunderstanding of his concept. In an essay published in 1957, he wrote:

In most of the examples I gave at that time, the starting point was a technological change or a scientific discovery, and the lagging, adaptive cultural element generally was a social organisation or an ideology. These examples led some researchers to think the cultural lag theory was a technological interpretation of history. Yet when the cultural lag theory was published, I pointed out that the independent variable could just as well be an ideology or other non-technological variable […]. So the fact that the technological changes always came first was simply due to the fact that at a particular point in time, only certain observations were available; but it is not an inherent part of the theory (Ogburn, 1969, p. 139).5

Yet, these aspects of Ogburn's theory – that could have formed the basis for a comprehensive theory of innovation – remained largely ignored in a wider theoretical context in which there was a one-sided focus on the relevance of technology for social change (Freeman, 1974; OECD, 1997).

Only in recent years has a new understanding of the innovation process become more important, in which openness towards society is central (FORA, 2010, p. 15 ff.). Individual aspects of this development are reflected in terms and concepts such as 'open innovation', 'customer and user integration', '(innovation) networks', 'multi-stakeholder dialogues' and 'the new power of the citizenry' (Marg *et al.*, 2013). The development of 'robust design concepts' (Gross *et al.*, 2005) and institutions that combine research and innovation with 'post-conventional forms of participation' (Marg *et al.*, 2013, p. 8) are explicitly the subject matter of, for example, transition management, transdisciplinary sustainability research, governance research and, particularly, network research (for example, Powell and Grodal, 2005). Thus, at the same time, social innovation has started to be seen as a type of innovation that is distinguishable from technological innovation with its own subject area, sphere of influence and field of application (Howaldt and Schwarz, 2010).

However, it is not possible to define social innovations solely by referring to a distinct social sphere or to socially desirable outcomes as their key purpose (Rammert, 2010, p. 40). Rather, what is at issue is the substantive core of the innovation. With social innovations, the new does not manifest itself in the medium of technological artefacts, but at the level of social practices. If it is accepted that the invention and diffusion of the steam engine, the computer or the smartphone should be regarded differently from the invention and social spread of a national system of healthcare provision, the concept of corporate social responsibility (CSR) or a system of micro lending, then it stands to reason that there is an intrinsic difference between technological and social innovations. While it is true that all innovations, regardless of their object, can be viewed as a social phenomenon, this does not obviate the need empirically to research the commonalities and differences between these two types of innovation. Even if, in reality, both types closely connect with each other in socio-technological systems, the need for analytical distinction does not disappear. This is all the more urgent given that existing sociological innovation research, that has emanated mainly from the sociology of technology, centres on the investigation of technological innovations:

If one asks what are the relevant innovations of the last 100 years or if one reads lists of the most important innovations, the answer usually is a series of technological inventions. (Rammert, 2010, p. 25)6

From this perspective, it becomes more important to devote greater attention to social innovation as a mechanism of change residing at the micro and meso levels. There are two main reasons for this. First, the shortcomings of older models of social change – and of an economically and technologically focused innovation model – have become increasingly apparent when dealing with the key social challenges (Howaldt and Schwarz, 2010). Second, new forms of social self-management, of the 'criticism that actually takes place in society' (Vobruba, 2013, p. 160), are becoming increasingly evident.

In the context of broader debates about sustainable development, there is a question about the relationship between social innovation and the transformative change of existing structures, policies, institutions and behaviours that aim to improve the quality of life. How can processes of transformative social change (Moore and Westley, 2011) be initiated which link social innovations from the mainstream of society with the intended social transformation processes? This

refers to moving an innovation into a broader system and creating transformation through the linking of opportunities and resources across scales. Quite often, to effect transformative change in a broader system, the innovation will be reconfigured into an entirely new form to suit that context. (Moore and Westley, 2011)

### **Tarde's analysis of social change**

Recourse to Tarde may be helpful in gaining a better theoretical understanding of the relationship between social innovation and social change (Howaldt *et al.*, 2014). Instead of explaining social change objectivistically or subjectivistically, he argued in terms of social practices of invention and imitation. Tarde's contribution to the understanding of a sociology of innovation can be used for developing a concept of social innovation as a social mechanism of change residing at the micro and meso levels. This seems all the more necessary given that Tarde's social theory – in terms of its implications and usefulness in the analysis of innovation – has been little explored until now.7

Revisiting Tarde's social theory – which, at its core, is a sociology of innovation – allows a widening of perspective on the nature of social innovation. This goes beyond the economic and technological innovations noted by Schumpeter (1964) and, after him, by the sociology of technology focused either on the social consequences of technology (Ogburn, 1937) or on the 'social shaping of technology' (MacKenzie and Wajcman, 1985; Williams and Sörensen, 2002) or 'social construction of technological systems' (Bijker, Hughes and Pinch, 1987). At the same time, this new focus reveals the blind spots of a narrow economic view. Because Tarde places the laws of the practices of imitation at the centre of his theory of social development, the associated micro foundations of social phenomena provide vital input into an integrative theory of innovation. It enables a discovery of how social phenomena – conditions and constructs – come into being and how they change. The key to this discovery is to analyse the development of social inventions and innovations as well as the associated social practices of their imitation.

Unlike Schumpeter, for whom the innovator – namely the 'entrepreneur' – is the focus of interest, Tarde is concerned with the *inventions* that are understood to be the central driver of social change. For Tarde, these are the many small inventions and ideas,

which were difficult or easy to arrive at and mostly went unnoticed at the time of their arising, which therefore are usually almost exclusively inglorious and nameless. (Tarde, 2009b, p. 26)

These countless inventions can change society and its practices through multiple acts of imitation, and only as a result of imitation do these inventions become an innovation and a true social phenomenon: 'In the realm of the social, everything takes place as invention and imitation, with imitation forming the rivers and inventions the mountains' (ibid, p. 27). For Tarde, imitation is the central mechanism of social reproduction and of social change:

All similarities of social origin that belong to the social world are the fruits of some kind of imitation, be it the imitation of customs or fashions through sympathy or obedience, instruction or education, naïve or carefully considered imitation. (ibid, p. 38)

According to Tarde, imitations always involve variations and simultaneously bring about innovations in social structures and practices. Added to this are individual initiatives and rebellions against prevailing morals, customs, rules – interruptions or crossings of 'imitation streams' – that are transferred and imitated from person to person, leading to social innovations.

'Researching the "many small inventions", according to Tarde, is a matter for a sociology which "has become a truly experimental science"' (Balke, 2009, p. 151). Social change must be viewed as a contingent phenomenon that resists any general (macro) theory. Because of the basic interdependence between social structures and social negotiation (Joas, 1992, p. 60), in every reproduced action there exists simultaneously the momentum of creation, change and transformation. The benefit of conceptualising a micro foundation of the social realm consists in decoding the recursive processes based on many small social inventions, ideas, initiatives and innovations as drivers of social change.

If social micro units are accorded constitutive importance for the dynamics of society, it becomes possible to describe social change not simply as a trend in the sense of a transition from one state at time *t* to another at time *t1*, but to see it as an independent non-deterministic reality. Thus, social innovation can be understood as a 'starting point for creating social dynamics behind technological innovations' (Geels, 2006, p. 6), that is, as change that arises as a result of constant changes by inventive and imitating actors (Tarde, 2009c, p. 67). With Tarde, social change can be traced back to the effects of small and micro units. Change is explained from the bottom up in current discourse on social transformation processes, as a fundamental prerequisite for substantial change (Paech, 2012). Its emergence from unintended and intentional deviations from the ideal of imitation provides the possibility of linking micro and macro perspectives (Gilgenmann, 2010, p. 7) – connecting a view of individuals in their society with a view of the society as a whole.

While the macro perspective looks at how social facts and constructs impact on social life, that is, it refers to the power of structures, institutions etc. to shape actions (see, for example, Hasse and Krücken, 2005, p. 17), the micro perspective on the social realm focuses on the 'law of their formation' (Tarde, 2009a, p. 101) and discovers how they emerge and transform, that is, it enables a micro foundation of social change. The key to analysis, therefore, lies in identifying social innovations that spread through society as a result of imitation to bring about social change: a 'process of change in the social structure of a society in its constitutive institutions, cultural patterns, associated social actions and conscious awareness' (Zapf, 2003, p. 427). These are non-teleological and highly contingent processes.

Tarde devised and pursued an analytical agenda that made social innovation the starting point for understanding social conditions and how they change. Accordingly,

the real causes of change consist of a chain of certainly very numerous ideas, which however are different and discontinuous, yet they are connected together by even far more numerous acts of imitation, for which they serve as a model. (Tarde, 2009b, p. 26)

For Tarde, there was only one decisive factor driving the constitution of society: the mutual imitation of individuals, kept moving by innovations of others (Keller, 2009, p. 233).

Development and change are enabled by invention, by successful initiatives that are imitated, and hence become (social) innovations: 'Social transformations are explained by the individual initiatives which are imitated' (Tarde, 1902, p. 1; as quoted by Michaelides and Theologou, 2010, p. 363). These are the directing, determining and explanatory force, the 'key drivers of social transformation processes' (Moebius, 2009, p. 269).

# **A new understanding of innovation and a new innovation policy?**

Based on Tarde's concept of innovation, key conclusions can be drawn with regard to a new understanding of innovation that contributes to its theoretical foundations and to the policy concepts associated with it.

#### **Social innovation as a driver of social change**

Social innovation is a central driver and element of social change. Hence, it is not surprising that it occupies a key position in debates concerned with how best to address major social challenges. It is important here to look at the findings of research on the genesis of technology and, in particular, at those approaches that tackle questions of transition management and sociotechnical system change (cf. Geels and Schot, 2007). Geels and Schot pursued a multi-level approach (MLP) by distinguishing three levels: niche innovations, the sociotechnical regime and the sociotechnical landscape. They understood 'transitions as outcomes of alignment between developments at multiple levels' or 'as changes from one sociotechnical regime to another' (ibid., p. 399). Starting from these basic assumptions, the authors developed a typology of transformation processes that differentiated between available resources (internal/external) and the degree of coordination. Whereas 'endogenous renewal' is performed by actors within an existing regime – in the form of consensus-oriented and planned efforts as a response to perceived pressure using resources internal to the regime – the 'reorientation of trajectories' results from a shock. In contrast, an 'emergent transformation' results from uncoordinated pressure from outside of the system boundaries, while 'purposive transition' is initiated from outside the existing regime as an intended and coordinated transformation process (ibid., p. 401).

These considerations allow for a closer inspection of the relationship between social innovation and social change. Seen in the light of Tarde's approach, new practices of social action would, first, be discovered and invented at the micro level, in social niches. From there, they could be imitated and spread by particular actors or networks of actors,8 changing themselves in this process. Furthermore, new social practices can develop outside of the prevailing imitation streams. Together with changes in the sociotechnical landscape – that exert pressure on the predominant sociotechnical system (for example, through environmental changes such as climate change) – or systemic dysfunctions (financial crisis, unemployment, social inequality, etc.), these developments can result in the destabilisation of the system and open up windows of opportunity for creating and spreading out niche innovations leading to transformation and, ultimately, the institutionalisation of new social practices.