Social innovation

Social innovations are new social practices that aim to meet social needs in a better way than the existing solutions,[1][2][3] resulting from - for example - working conditions, education, community development or health. These ideas are created with the goal of extending and strengthening civil society. Social innovation includes the social processes of innovation, such as open source methods and techniques and also the innovations which have a social purpose—like activism, crowdfunding, time-based currency, telehealth, cohousing, coworking, universal basic income, collaborative consumption, social enterprise, participatory budgeting, repair Café, virtual volunteering, microcredit, or distance learning. There are many definitions of social innovation, however, they usually include the broad criteria about social objectives, social interaction between actors or actor diversity, social outputs, and innovativeness (The innovation should be at least "new" to the beneficiaries it targets, but it does not have to be new to the world). Different definitions include different combinations and different number of these criteria (e.g. EU is using definition, stressing out social objectives and actors interaction).[4] Transformative social innovation not only introduces new approaches to seemingly intractable problems, but is successful in changing the social institutions that created the problem in the first place.[5]

According to Herrero de Egaña B., social innovation is defined as "new or novel ways that society has to deal with Relevant Social Challenges (RSCh), that are more effective, efficient and sustainable or that generate greater impact than the previous ones and that contribute to making it stronger and more articulated".[6]

Prominent innovators associated with the term include Pakistani Akhter Hameed Khan, Bangladeshi Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank which pioneered the concept of microcredit for supporting innovations in many developing countries such as Asia, Africa and Latin America,[7] and inspired programs like the Jindal Centre for Social Innovation & Entrepreneurship and Infolady Social Entrepreneurship Programme[8][9] of Dnet (A Social Enterprise).

  1. ^ Howaldt, J.; Schwarz, M. (2010). "Social Innovation: Concepts, research fields and international trends" (PDF). IMO International Monitoring.
  2. ^ do Adro, Francisco; Fernandes, Cristina I. (2020). "Social innovation: a systematic literature review and future agenda research". International Review on Public and Nonprofit Marketing. 17 (1): 23–40. doi:10.1007/s12208-019-00241-3. S2CID 255527398.
  3. ^ Satalkina, Liliya; Steiner, Gerald (2022). "Social Innovation: A Retrospective Perspective". Minerva. 60 (4): 567–591. doi:10.1007/s11024-022-09471-y. PMC 9283819. PMID 35855418.
  4. ^ Milosevic N, Gok A, Nenadic G (June 2018). "Classification of Intangible Social Innovation Concepts". Natural Language Processing and Information Systems. Lecture Notes in Computer Science. Vol. 10859. Cham: Springer. pp. 407–418. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-91947-8_42. ISBN 978-3-319-91946-1. S2CID 43955397.
  5. ^ Cite error: The named reference Westley Patton Zimmerman 2006 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  6. ^ Herrero de Egaña, Blanca (2018). "La Innovación Social en España: Ejes vertebradores desde la Teoría Fundamentada". Universidad Pontificia Comillas de Madrid. Retrieved 24 May 2022.
  7. ^ Domanski, Dmitri; Monge, Nicolás; Quitiaquez V., Germán A.; Rocha, Daniel (2016). Innovación Social en Latinoamérica (PDF) (in Spanish). Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios. ISBN 978-958-763-196-8.
  8. ^ "Internet rolls into Bangladesh villages on a bike". Asafeworldforwomen.org. Retrieved 2014-05-22.
  9. ^ "Info Ladies – Riding Internet into Rural Bangladesh!". Amader Kotha. 2012-11-08. Archived from the original on 2014-03-17. Retrieved 2014-05-22.