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This paper aims to unpack the sets of policy ideas underpinning the use of social innovation, thus permeating the allegedly politically neutral language of the concept.

Drawing on Daigneualt (2014), this paper adapts a four-dimensional approach to investigate the sets of ideas underpinning different conceptualisations of social innovation, particularly in relation to who the actors driving social change are, the nature of the problems addressed, the objectives pursued and the means used to achieve these objectives.

Applying the four-dimensional approach to a corpus of literature, this paper found evidence of two different perspectives along each dimension, namely, a radical empowerment approach and an incremental market-oriented one.

A limitation of the study is the focus on academic literature, whereas a broader focus on policy discourse may give further insights. However, this paper argues that this study can be the ground for future research to investigate whether and how the two approaches identified have been adopted in different institutional and policy contexts.

The paper contributes to the development of social innovation research by boosting and encouraging further investigation on how different sets of ideas underpin social innovation discourse and its use as a policy concept.

This paper aims to provide a nuanced understanding of philosophies underpinning social innovation based on the action research strategies applied in the field.

Literature review was conducted to identify action research strategies referred to in the social innovation literature. Through stratified purposive sampling, the authors then selected nonprofit organizations, each closely associated with one of the strategies. Qualitative content analysis was applied to documents published by these organizations for an in-depth exploration of how the action research strategies frame the three dimensions of social innovation, namely, the product, process and empowerment dimensions.

The authors identified four broad action research strategies referred to in the social innovation literature. Each strategy inspires four distinct narratives of social innovation centered around key concepts: prototyping, evidence, asset-building and co-creation.

The methodology used is characterized by depth rather than scope. Although diverse types of documents were used, the documents are limited to publications by four institutions. A deductive approach using the categories should be used in future empirical research.

The paper contributes to the discussion about different schools and research agendas in the field of social innovation. In particular, the authors examine the action research strategies adopted in the field, shedding light on incompatible views and strategies within certain research clusters while identifying common ground between authors belonging to different schools.

This paper discusses how service design can be used to activate a transition of textile artisan communities towards a sustainable future.

Two participatory case studies were undertaken with textile artisans in the UK and South Africa. These led to the development of an original methodological framework for “crafting situated services” – services designed to be meaningful to the local communities within which they are embedded. An evaluation study assessed the originality of the framework, its relevance for tackling real-world problems, its extensibility and the rigour of the research process.

The framework brings together a variety of roles, methods and tools that designers can adopt in order to enter communities, make sense of sustainable futures, facilitate the co-design of situated services and activate legacies within communities. Building on emerging anthropological approaches, the framework makes a bridge between service management and service design for social innovation, advancing the field towards design for social entrepreneurship.

Arguing against the idea of the designer “parachuting” into communities to create services regardless of the local context, the concept of “situated services” is proposed in this paper, alongside a process for “crafting” meaningful social innovations. This requires the service designer to adopt a more situated and embedded approach to designing with communities in order to align with their needs and aspirations, interweave places, time, people and practices within the process, and co-design contextually better services.

This chapter emphasizes the importance of potential and realized capabilities in building and sustaining social innovations. We present an assessment of the drivers and barriers to the development of social innovation ecosystems through the use of internal (absorptive capacities) and external organizational capabilities (open social innovation). A particular emphasis is placed on social innovation outcomes and impacts. The capability approach is particularly useful for measuring social innovation impacts and investigating the “micro-meso-macro” of linkages that underlie the process of social innovation.

Our methodological approach measures social innovations’ outcomes and impact through an aggregative model, which takes into consideration different forms of capabilities that are engendered in the process of or as a result of social innovation. This methodology highlights the importance of social innovation drivers and contexts in which knowledge exploration and exploitation lead to the creation of capabilities that help social innovators to respond to unfulfilled social needs.

The research presented in this chapter provides a new perspective on how the capability approach can be used to assess and measure individual and collective actions when facing social challenges.

Our research supports and complements the findings of the EU project SIMPACT an acronym for “Boosting the Impact of SI in Europe through Economic Underpinnings,” by highlighting the processes and outcomes and SI impact measurement.

The measurement of social innovation outcomes and impact has gained importance for policy makers and constitutes a strategic tool for designing policies in support of social entrepreneurs, social investors, and private and public organizations which participate in cocreating and implementing innovative projects.

The research presented in this chapter sheds light on the “micro-meso-macro” linkages that foster social innovation ecosystems, and offer valuable tools and guidelines to researchers, practitioners, and policymaker in the field of innovation in general and social innovation in particular.

Today’s pressing global societal challenges are urgent and require substantial solutions and innovations that tackle the roots of a problem. These challenges call for new forms of leadership, stakeholder engagement and innovation. This paper aims to examine whether, why and how business leaders engage in social innovation. The authors argue that leadership perspective and motivation are important drivers for developing substantial social innovations suited to resolving societal challenges at their roots. More specifically, the authors propose that intra-personal factors (degree of care and compassion), an inter-relational perspective of leadership (shareholder versus stakeholder) and the corresponding leadership motivation (personalized versus socialized) may unveil what quality of social innovation (first-order versus second-order solutions) is pursued by a business leader. Implications for future research and practice are provided.

The authors revisit the concept of social innovation and explore its connection with care and compassion. They suggest a series of propositions pertaining to the relationship between different configurations of leadership and different forms of social innovation.

Responsible business leaders with an integrative leader trait configuration (stakeholder perspective, socialized motivation, high degree of care and compassion) are more likely to foster substantial second-order social innovations for uprooting societal problems than business leader with an instrumental leader trait configuration (shareholder perspective, personalized motivation, low degree of care and compassion). An organization’s stakeholder culture plays a moderating role in the relation between leadership and social innovation.

This paper reveals a path for conceptualizing leadership in social innovation from a stakeholder perspective. Future research should investigate the role of business leaders, their mindsets, styles and relational competencies in co-creation processes of social innovation empirically. If the development of substantial second-order social innovations requires leaders with a stakeholder perspective and socialized approach, then this has implications for leader selection and development.

This paper advocates for new kinds of leaders in facilitating and sustaining social innovations to tackle global societal challenges.

The purpose of this study is to highlight the benefits and challenges of immersive, design thinking and community-engaged pedagogies for supporting social innovation within higher education; assess the impact of such approaches across stakeholder groups through long-term retrospective analysis of transdisciplinary and cross-stakeholder work; offer an approach to ecosystems design and analysis that accounts for complex system dynamics in higher education partnerships.

This study uses constructivist grounded theory (Charmaz and Belgrave, 2012) to create a long-term systemic analysis of university innovation efforts. Researchers analysed 37 semi-structured interviews across key stakeholders involved in the design and implementation of the Design Thinking Studio in Social Innovation. Interview subjects include alumni (students), faculty, community partners and administrators. Interviews were coded using constant comparative coding (Mills et al., 2006) to develop and analyse themes. This study includes situated perspectives from the authors who offer their subjective relationship to the Studio’s development.

This paper assesses the outcomes and design of a transdisciplinary cross-stakeholder social innovation program and extends prior research on the potential and challenges of design thinking and immersive pedagogies for supporting service-learning and community engagement (SLCE) practices within higher education. Qualitative interview results reveal how time, resources and other structural and systemic factors operate across stakeholder groups. The findings address a gap in SLCE and social innovation literature by situating community learning within pedagogical interventions constructed not only for the benefit of students but for community members. The authors conclude that the research on social innovation in higher education could benefit from a more intentional examination of longitudinal effects of innovative pedagogical environments across a broad range of stakeholder perspectives and contexts.

This paper identifies how innovative higher education programs are forced to navigate structural, epistemological and ethical quandaries when engaging in community-involved work. Sustainable innovation requires such programs to work within institutional structures while simultaneously disrupting entrenched structures, practices, and processes within the system.

Social innovation in higher education could benefit from harnessing lessons from collective impact and ecosystem design frameworks. In addition, the authors argue higher education institutions should commit to studying longitudinal effects of innovative pedagogical environments across multiple stakeholder perspectives and contexts. This study closes these gaps by advancing an ecosystems model for long-term and longitudinal assessment that captures the impact of such approaches across stakeholder groups and developing an approach to designing and assessing community-involved collaborative learning ecosystems (CiCLE).

This paper aims to determine whether a combined set of process models for university contributions to social innovation can be effectively used to describe how higher education institutions facilitate and disseminate research for social value.

The author applies Cunha and Benneworth’s (2013) social innovation process model, with additions from the Nichols et al. (2013) model of campus-community collaboration and the Jain et al. (2020) social value framework, to a pair of case studies at Portland State University about research projects on homelessness. Information was gathered through primary sources, observation and secondary texts.

Applying the models to the case studies provides additional detail on the types and value of Portland State University’s contributions to addressing homelessness through social innovation. The models are found to be effective in describing and providing guidance for social innovation research projects at other higher education institutions.

The models may have widespread applicability in understanding or designing university contributions to social innovation, but additional case studies and analysis are needed to understand the full range of project types and institutional contexts to which they can be successfully applied.

The projects described in the paper’s case studies have not been analyzed elsewhere using social innovation frameworks and are valuable in their own right as social innovations worthy of replication. The findings of the paper extend the applicability of a process model for university contributions to social innovation.

The purpose of this paper is to question the appropriateness of current lab types for addressing wicked problems. A new lab type, a Systemic Innovation Lab, is proposed which combines the features of existing labs that are suited to addressing wicked problems.

Characteristics of initiatives that are considered appropriate for addressing wicked problems and existing lab types that contain any of these characteristics are identified. These lab types are Social Innovation Labs, Living Labs, Urban Living Labs, Urban Transition Labs and Public Sector Innovation Labs. The proposed new lab type is reasoned by combining the features of existing labs that are suited to addressing wicked problems. How the new lab would work in practice is illustrated with a case study.

When addressing wicked problems, labs need to take a systemic design and not a service design approach. They also need to focus on addressing complex problems, take a place-based and transition approach, enable coherent action by diverse actors, involve users as co-creators, support a networked governance approach and recognize government as an enabler of change.

This paper provides a new lab type designed specifically for addressing wicked problems. This new lab supports practitioners that take a systemic design, solution ecosystem and systemic innovation approach. Systemic design is based on a core set of principles that are a crossover between design and complexity theory.

For the first time, this paper analyzes different lab types to determine their appropriateness for addressing wicked problems. It also proposes a new lab type whose sole purpose is addressing wicked problems.

This study aims to enhance the understanding of the nature of collaboration between public and nonpublic actors in delivering social services and achieving social innovation in a fragile context, with an emphasis on the role of civil society organisations (CSOs). The paper focuses on Bosnia and Herzegovina, a Southeastern European country which has faced a turbulent post-conflict transition and experienced challenges in its social welfare policy and practice.

This study uses institutional theory, particularly new institutionalism and institutional networking, as a lens through which to understand public and nonpublic collaboration and social innovation within a fragile context. This study adopts a sequential mixed-method approach. Data were derived from 15 semi-structured interviews with representatives from local CSOs, international donors and public institutions, as well as a survey of 120 CSO representatives.

The collaboration and social innovation in a fragile welfare context have been initiated primarily by nonpublic actors and developed within the triple context of relations between public, civil and foreign donors’ organisations. In such a context, coercive, normative and mimetic isomorphisms act as leading drivers, but also as potential barriers of public–nonpublic collaboration and social innovation. They are triggered by influences from multiple actors, challenging power relations and external pressures on local CSOs.

The paper contributes to the growing research interest in the role of nonpublic actors in the provision of public services and public social innovation, but examines these issues from the perspective of a fragile context, which has thus far been overlooked in the literature.