Social Innovation

New Forms of Organisation in Knowledge–Based Societies

Carmen Ruiz Viñals, Carmen Parra Rodríguez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136181801
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

'Social innovation' can be simply defined as the new ideas and initiatives that make it possible to meet our society's challenges in areas such as the environment, education, employment, culture, health and economic development. It is currently becoming increasingly important as a central concept for social theories and politics. This edited volume brings together interdisciplinary contributions which examine the complex interrelation between innovation and social problems, a link which has been surprisingly underexplored in academia and practice thus far.

Social Innovation: New Forms of Organisation in Knowledge–Based Societies examines the mutual interdependence of innovation processes and social affairs. This interdependent relationship is characterised by a high degree of complexity which stems on the one hand from the true uncertain character of innovation and on the other hand from the different time scales in both domains.

The alliance between innovation and social policy is highly relevant to the challenges which we are facing in the 21st century, such as resource scarcity, ageing societies and climate change. All of these issues demand substantial, continuous and sustainable structural change to maintain international competitiveness. Social change can only be understood by improving our knowledge about the impact of innovation processes in their co-evolutionary alliance with social evolution.

The purpose of this book is to increase awareness of social participation among civil society organisations, SMEs, governments and research institutions, in order to promote economic, political and social changes that enhance collective welfare. This volume offers a key starting point for those looking to further explore this important realm of social research.

Part I

The concept of social innovation

Introduction to social innovation as a new form of organisation in knowledge-based societies

Carmen Ruiz Viñals

The term ‘social innovation’ refers to a design and implementation process as well as a process of disseminating new social practices and policies. It encompasses innovations that are directly related to the search for solutions to society’s problems and challenges. These solutions often involve new forms of communication and cooperation. Social innovation is currently becoming increasingly important as a central concept for social theories and politics. Hence social innovation can be simply defined as the new ideas and initiatives that make it possible to meet our society’s large or small challenges in areas including the environment, education, employment, culture, health and economic development.

This book comprises a number of contributions focusing on the central imperative of this evident connection between innovation and social problems, which despite its importance has only barely been considered in academia as well as in practice to date.

The alliance between innovation and social policy is highly relevant to face the challenges of the twenty-first century such as scarcity of resources, ageing societies as well as man-made climate change. All of them demand substantial, continuous and sustainable structural change to maintain international competitiveness. Social change can only be understood by improving our knowledge about the impact of innovation processes in their co-evolutionary alliance with social evolution.

The chapters in this book therefore bring together some distinguished authors who start to explore this prolific and important realm of social research. The book is about the mutual interdependence of innovation processes and social affairs. This interdependent relationship is characterised by a high degree of complexity which stems on the one hand from the true uncertain character of innovation and on the other hand from the different time scales in both domains.

Cross-cutting factors shaping the social innovation initiatives in this book

Social innovation consists of creating generative scenarios in which society can use advanced social technologies to foster interdisciplinary dialogue and access to collective knowledge to create systemic solutions and proposals for social benefit. The substantive change that is required occurs locally through collective actions carried out by ordinary people. Global transformation takes place when local efforts are connected and people learn together. At present society, business and government are disjointed and there are no communication and cooperation systems in place that enable us to act intelligently and constructively. We are reinventing existing solutions, competing with each other and struggling individually to get ahead. There has to be a paradigm shift whereby instead of competing, we cooperate by joining forces to move forward as a society.

As noted above, the term ‘social innovation’ refers to the design, implementation and diffusion of new social practice and public policies to promote change in the social organisation of people to achieve economic ends. This involves innovations directly related to the process of finding solutions to collective problems, whether in the public, private or third sector. These solutions concern new forms of communication and cooperation.

Innovation refers to the ideas and initiatives that will make it possible to achieve social goals in an era of economic crisis. Social innovation is applied to different types of social challenges, including the sustainable economy and economic development, protection of the natural environment, corporate social responsibility and promoting education, employment, culture and health. Consequently this is a multidisciplinary book that examines in a cross-cutting way how social innovation strategies can be addressed from a range of perspectives.

It will be seen how the various authors in this book understand social innovation as new practices, methods or systems for performing traditional processes, and in particular how these can be carried out with greater participation by the community and beneficiaries. Encouraging the participation of civil society is the first of the themes of this book, which provides continuity and meaning by analysing a number of innovative experiences in this field. The key is to understand how people become actors in their own development and the collective actions that affect them individually, something which strengthens their self-esteem as community members. Their contributions become substantive in collective decision-making.

Thus from the collective standpoint social innovation is a contribution to the strengthening of citizenship and consolidation of the participation of beneficiaries in the community. It will also be seen how in the various experiences that are discussed in this book, social innovation includes special emphasis on improving the effectiveness of organisations and the use of technological innovation is essential for this. Hence social innovation entails introducing a new vision of the things we always do and further involves generating new, more efficient processes. This is the second common factor to be found throughout the chapters of this book.

Third, the next common denominator that runs across the analysis by the various authors in this book is the concept of network. Network relationships take on an active role at an intra-organisational and inter-organisational level in the style of fractals. A fractal is a plane or spatial figure that is made up of infinite elements. Its main property is that its appearance and statistical distribution do not vary regardless of the scale at which it is observed, as established by mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot in 1975. From the standpoint used in this book, social innovation would be based on a fractal network that emerges in a bottom-up approach, i.e. from individuals or organisations that receive community support services. Leadership would thus be shared between social agents, citizens and public entities without the principle of hierarchy prevailing in the configuration of the new benefit or service.

The fourth common element of the analyses presented in this book is social diffusion. When social innovation projects are put in place in both the private and the public sector, a major consequence is the generation of diffusion dynamics, i.e. the transmission of experiences to similar organisations. This is done through organisational imitation of ‘good practice’, which includes building key aspects of innovation, such as efficiency, evaluation of effectiveness and economy in the delivery of such services or the generation of new public goods, into new organisations. An example of this would be the case of microloans. Starting out as a local project in Bangladesh, a country with an underdeveloped economy, it turned into a global social innovation initiative and has gone on to become an instrument used by all kinds of economies worldwide.

The fifth factor that characterises the studies in this book is a ‘glocal’ focus. The development of social innovation calls for a twin vision: a strategic approach that includes a local dimension in its implementation and a global dimension that provides for its potential export to other areas worldwide. Social innovation which is designed to meet human needs seeks to cater for basic needs first before extending to other human needs in second place. Hence it begins by dealing with problems that arise at the level of a small group of people locally. It is the dissemination of its achievements and results that leads to its global expansion by means of its network configuration and intensive use of communication technologies.

The chapters in this book show how in times of economic crisis when many people might choose attitudes such as resignation, isolation or confrontation, innovative initiatives are coming forward as a meeting point for people, governments, third sector organisations and businesses concerned about change. Innovation, along with the integration of efforts, collaborative work, cooperation and replication of best practice, provides an attractive option for many stake-holders and even encourages the undertaking of business activities. The engine of this change is the introduction of innovation which means that the delivery of a service or the production of goods is performed in a novel way, resulting in a different situation to the one that existed previously; it enables the provision of goods and/or services with greater efficiency, effectiveness and economy than under the original conditions. This is especially true in the public sector and the third sector, but it is also important in the private sector. Using social innovation not only enhances social welfare but it can also enable economic development and organisational regeneration.

The studies in this book put forward some interpretative keys that can help us better understand the scope and reach of the concept of social innovation as an emerging concept.

The studies in this book

The purpose of this book is to help create a culture of social participation among civil society organisations, SMEs, governments and academic and research institutions that involves fostering collective intelligence processes in their own entities as well as in social perception at the municipal, state and supra-state levels to promote economic, political and social changes that enhance collective welfare.

To that end the chapters of this book deal with different aspects of this complex interrelationship between innovation and social problems. The contributors to this book were invited to write their chapters following the outline given above. The authors were chosen to best cover the various scientific realms occupied with the respective research topics. All the authors are well-recognised researchers in their fields. The book attempts to connect the various research areas in order to cover the broader implications of the alliance between innovation and social programmes.

To understand the outstanding meaning of the co-evolutionary relationship between innovation and social issues, the first part of the book deals with the conceptual approach to the issue of social innovation. In this preliminary chapter Carmen Ruíz Viñals (Abat Oliba CEU University, Barcelona) argues that social innovation is the process of designing, implementing and disseminating new social policies and practices. This chapter provides an introduction and guide to understanding the various topics covered in the book. Also by way of introduction, in Chapter 1 on Social Innovations and the Advancement of the General Concept of Innovation, Josef Hochgerner (zentrum für Soziale Innovation: ZSI Centre for Social Innovation) starting from a general assessment of the relevance of innovations in social change introduces us to the specific concept of social innovation. Accompanied by the current economic crises and the broad acknowledgement of the so-called ‘grand Challenges’, the concept of innovations devoted to the provision of social value has recently become a hot topic in politics, science and for a relatively broad public. Social innovations are new practices for resolving societal challenges, adopted and utilised by the social groups concerned. The creation and implementation of social innovations require processes with a number of stages and cyclical learning. The readiness to change is usually neither a property inherent in social systems and cultures in business and public administrations, nor in society as a whole. knowledge, attitudes and opinions are not single levers for modifying behaviour. Josef Hochgerner’s chapter seeks to comprehend knowledge as capacity for social action, and thus to focus research and social practices on how to transform the knowledge available into action.

Also by way of introduction, Chapter 2 on Social Innovations in the Perspective of Comprehensive Neo-Schumpeterian Economics by Andreas Pyka (University of Hohenheim) and Horst Hanusch (University of Augsburg) examines the theoretical basis for this social approach; social innovation shares several common features with technological innovation. This is because social entrepreneurs play a major role in the introduction of social innovation which is similar to the role played by business entrepreneurs in the introduction of new technologies, while furthermore true uncertainty matters in both activities.

Part II about Innovation and Non-Profit Organisations introduces the reader to what NGOs need to do to succeed in the new environment of social innovation. There are three chapters in this section. The first, Chapter 3, by Tibor Palankai (Corvinus University, Budapest) on Non-Profit Organisations and New Social Paradigms, examines how knowledge has become a new and crucial production factor and is furthermore abundant, renewable and unlimitedly available. The traditional assumption of ‘scarce resources’ in economics needs to be revised as the scarcity of traditional factors (land, capital and labour) has now become relative. All this opens up new opportunities for economic growth, efficiency and welfare.

Second, Chapter 4 by Peter Maple (Institute of Fundraising Consultants Group) and Alex Murdock (London South Bank University) on Fundraising and Transparency in the Not-for-profit Sector examines the concept of fundraising in the light of transparency primarily from the perspective of the Uk though some material from North America is also included. The definition of fundraising used is broad in nature inclusive of fundraising from a range of sources and by various methods. The chapter studies the emergence of ‘face to face’ fundraising sometimes undertaken by private organisations on behalf of non-profits. Transparency is also viewed in a broad fashion to encompass not just transparency in the raising of funds but also transparency in the utilisation of the funds raised, in the governance of the non-profit and in the outcomes of the activities of the non-profit organisation.

Third, in Chapter 5 Rui Teixeira Santos (Lusophone University, Portugal) uses his chapter on Social Innovation Oriented to Solving Practical Problems: The Case of the Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa to analyse a case of successful local social innovation where what really matters is not only innovation but also designing adequate solutions to our surrounding reality that allow us to respond to concrete problems. The response to the crisis by the Santa Casa da Misericórdia de Lisboa has been not only a social innovation case but also a creative design of solutions, an attitude which has made it possible to incorporate the complexity of the context and respond to concrete situations in a time of financial crisis and recession in Portugal. Innovation is not the answer for the third sector in a time of crisis, but it is an important element that non-profit organisations have to incorporate in their functioning. In the solidarity economy, innovation may prove to be useful, although nevertheless it may lead to the fa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Part I: The concept of social innovation
• Part II: Innovation and non-profit organisations
• Part III: Social innovation and new technologies
• Part IV: Social entrepreneurship
• Conclusion
• Index