Votre recherche

Potential contributions of universities to social innovation are explored with special attention to Southern countries. The normative guide is the notion of Sustainable Human Development understood as stressing the agency of least-advantaged sectors. The main challenges stem from decreasing sustainability and increasing inequality. Their impacts are highly dependent on how the tension between economic growth and environmental protection is managed. Improving actual perspectives demands harnessing advanced knowledge to foster inclusive and frugal innovation. For this to occur, universities need to be main actors. The context in which they act is analyzed with reference to the National Systems of Innovation conceptualization. Possible evolutions of universities as agents of social innovation are discussed with the aid of the Multi-Level Perspective. The importance of the Southern experience of innovating in scarcity conditions is highlighted and illustrated with the specific experience of a Latin American university. The cooperation of universities with weak social actors in ways that involve advanced knowledge appears as a key theoretical issue and as a difficult practical problem for the effective engagement of universities in social innovation. The diverse issues that such engagement needs to integrate conform an ambitious research program, of which the paper aims at giving a first glimpse.

For decades, the cooperative enterprise (CE) produces market goods and/or provides services in the interest to its members, such as communities, customers, and suppliers. The upsurge of interest in social enterprises, and their balancing of social and economic interests, has also led to a renewed interest in CEs, often seen as a specific type of social enterprise. However, from an organizational perspective, this renewed interest has been both limited and scattered over a variety of fields. In this paper, we systematically review papers on CE in the mainstream organizational literature, defined as literature in the fields of economics, business, management and sociology. Our review integrates and synthesizes the current topics in the mainstream organizational literature and provides a number of avenues for future research. In addition, we compare our findings in the organizational literature to the social issues literature as these appeared to be quite complimentary. We found multilevel studies, determination of social impact—in particular measurable impact, managerial practices for sustainable (organisational) development, and the entrepreneurial opportunity generation process as the four key avenues for future research.

Social innovation is conceptualised as having two intimately related pillars: institutional innovation and locally embedded innovation, in the sense of social economy. Two main research questions were addressed: how political, institutional innovation is fostered and how does it influence social economy? A mixed methods research was conducted in the Mühlviertel NUTS3 region. Despite a framework of enhanced autonomy and institutional innovation for the main stakeholders, both macro and micro analysis illustrate a lack of intermediate space to: a) link the innovative agenda to high-state political agendas, and b) link institutional innovation to social economy.

Local energy policy agendas require commonly defined desirable future visions and collective agenda-setting to spur collaborative action. However, methods designed for multi-stakeholder engagement often do not sufficiently open up deliberative processes to all voices, and efforts to envision desired futures built from current local energy challenges are usually designed by and oriented towards specialists. With this paper, we aimed to explore how the theoretical strengths of storytelling for supporting local policy processes play out in practice. We contrast what the literature states about the potential of storytelling for solving complex challenges and facilitating collaborative processes to the lessons learnt from actually using storytelling in a set of 17 multi-stakeholder workshops across 17 European countries run as part of the H2020 SHAPE ENERGY project. The workshops were each designed around a tangible local energy policy challenge. We found storytelling has unique strengths in terms of enabling significant (un)learning regarding stakeholder relationships, allowing participants to step into others’ perspectives, keeping hold of diversity, and the use of ‘we’ in stories leading to concrete future initiatives. We also note specific learnings about when these outcomes may not be achieved, for example due to fears, traditions, hierarchical structures, as well as the need for sufficient time for planning, facilitator training and stakeholder invitations. We conclude that as an innovative, playful and flexible methodology, storytelling can undoubtedly be a valuable additional tool for policymakers where there is a desire for deliberative stakeholder involvement, and appetite to tailor approaches to local contexts.

Social business is a new kind of business model, which integrates multiple dimensions and meanings, including management experiences from private, public, and nonprofit organizations. Social business has a goal of solving social problems through entrepreneurship, combining efficiency, innovation, and resources from a traditional enterprise with mission and values of a nonprofit organization

L’article est basé sur une enquête portant sur la structuration de la démarche de développement durable et responsabilité sociale (DD-RS) dans les universités françaises. Il s’appuie sur la théorie de la structuration et la Théorie Néo-Institutionnelle pour construire un cadre conceptuel à la structuration de cette mission. Ce dernier est confronté à la pratique des établissements et débouche sur une typologie fondée sur le rôle de l’implication politique, de la culture du pilotage et des isomorphismes. La discussion autour de cette typologie, à partir d’une ACM montrant l’existence de groupes homogènes d’universités quant à leur structuration d’une démarche DD-RS, permet d’affiner le rôle de chacun des facteurs du modèle conceptuel.

In the past twenty years, innovation has slowly, but steadily, become an important presence in development cooperation discourse and practice. The ambitious UN 2030 Sustainable Development Agenda has accelerated this trend, providing a strong framework for the main argument in favour of an innovation agenda for international development: without new ideas and innovative solutions, solving the current global development challenges will not be possible. Although this innovation-push is in line with a wider predominant view of innovation as an inherently positive force of progress, that alone does not explain when, how, and why innovation becomes a key topic in the field. This paper seeks to fill this gap in the literature, providing an initial overview of innovation in development cooperation in the post-2000s. It argues, firstly, that innovation has always been part of international development policy and practice. Secondly, it links the recent strengthening of the innovation discourse to three trends in the systemic transformation of the field: the triumph of metrics-based agendas, the ICTs and digitalization revolutions, and the role of private sector actors. It concludes by critically assessing the implications of this narrative in changing the politics of innovation towards more inclusive sustainable development policies and practices.

The role of big finance and technology in social change is rapidly evolving. This book examines why large financial players are entering the social sector through social finance. Drawing on empirical research, the authors analyse the opportunities this new interest and commitment presents as well as the potential harm that can be done to vulnerable people when beneficiaries are not treated as partners and the social needs of people are not placed at the centre of the investment model. This book introduces a ‘Deliberate Leadership’ framework to help big finance tackle problems with no easy solutions. The book also analyses how current technologies (including blockchain) are being used and the benefits and drawbacks of different features of these technologies from the standpoint of the beneficiary and investor. The authors derive a series of insights into the model of technology for social finance and impact investing. Written as a practical book for students alongside a field book based on an action learning methodology, this volume will be useful to those in social finance and impact investing.

Ethical, social and environmental accounting is the practice of assessing organisations' performances in sustainability and business ethics topics. The organisations typically publish the results in a sustainability or non-financial report. We aim at offering a novel perspective from which researchers investigate, practitioners apply and policy-makers regulate ethical, social and environmental accounting (ESEA). The large quantity of ESEA methods and tools causes managerial problems, affecting the identity of social enterprises and complicating policy making. We will develop a domain-specific modelling language to specify existing ESEA methods and capture the advantages of model-driven engineering. We will create a repository where method models can be stored. These models contain the data structure and configuration of the methods. We will also develop openESEA, a run-time model interpreter that automatically executes ESEA method models. We will offer features to allow organisations to tailor the methods to their needs, to support model management operations, and to compare existing methods to inform policy makers about their similarities and differences. This project combines expertise in information science and social entrepreneurship with the intention to pave the way to future research avenues in ESEA and, eventually, to profound changes towards a fair and sustainable economy.

The last few years witnessed theoretical and practical contributions to the field of social innovation and social enterprise. However, analysis of the interplay between these two different realms is still limited. This article aims to fill some gaps in this respect. We deal with historical reconstruction of the concept of Social Enterprise and Social Innovation, and their conceptual premises. We consider the process of creation of social innovation in social enterprises. As members’ motivations, ownership rights and governance rules in social enterprises create a new relational context and new routines, which are germane to the production of social knowledge and deliberation, social innovation can be considered one of the main outcomes of this setting. Social motivations, collective action of a cooperative kind, multistakeholder governance and socialization of resources, and their interplay are singled out as main drivers of innovation. Social innovation is seen as akin to novelty in social interaction, a non-standardized and non-standardizable outcome of the operation of this organizational form.

This study seeks to understand the nature and process of social innovation driven by mature social economy enterprises, and the innovative capability that supports it. The research examines enterprise capabilities by means of the institutional approach to social innovation and the Resource-Based View theory (RBV). Based on grounded theory, this research focuses on a single case, the creation of the Desjardins Environment Fund (DEF). Launched 25 years ago,1 DEF is the first mutual fund in North America to include extra-financial criteria in its evaluation of business environmental management practices (fund securities) for the information of individual investors. The findings of this empirical research show how a major cooperative bank can generate social innovation and how this entails organizational innovations. The findings also reveal how these innovations benefit from the strategic and process resources that the Desjardins Movement managed to develop while taking into account both its core business (as a bank) and its purpose (as a cooperative). This study shows that the innovative potential of the mature social economy enterprise should not be underestimated.

Cette recherche se propose d’explorer le processus de développement de l’entreprise d’économie sociale issue d’un partenariat fondateur. Nous nous intéressons plus particulièrement à la façon dont l’entreprise d’économie sociale opère, à travers ses choix d’orientation et organisationnels, l’équilibre entre ses besoins propres de développement et les besoins spécifiques de son partenaire de fondation. La Caisse d’économie Desjardins de la Culture constitue le terrain d’investigation. Le rôle de cette organisation, issue d’un partenariat avec l’Union des artistes (UDA), est passé de celui de prestataire de services aux membres de l’UDA à celui d’agent de développement du milieu de la culture. En décrivant les étapes et leviers de ce passage, nous nous attachons à comprendre le mécanisme d’autonomisation de l’organisation par rapport à son partenaire d’origine.