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L’innovation sociale est devenue, en quelques années, un concept tellement galvaudé qu’il entretient une large confusion dans les débats. Utilisé d’abord en Amérique du Nord [1], il s’est généralisé avec l’arrivée, dans les années 90, de la notion anglo-saxonne d’« entrepreneurs sociaux ». Introduit ensuite par des travaux initiés par la Communauté européenne [2], il est entré dans la loi française du 31 juillet 2014 relative à l’économie sociale et solidaire (ESS). L’objet de notre article n’est pas de dresser un inventaire des différentes acceptions de ce concept, mais plutôt de chercher, d’une part, à asseoir sa définition sur des fondements théoriques et, d’autre part, à tirer les conséquences pragmatiques de ce positionnement. Nous commencerons par l’innovation technologique, car c’est d’elle qu’il est question lorsque l’on évoque l’innovation sans donner d’autres précisions. Nous verrons cependant que cette définition masque des sous-entendus qui nous serviront pour définir l’innovation sociale. Cette définition peut déboucher sur deux approches : l’une collaborative, l’autre coopérative. Il importe de le préciser, car elles n’ont pas les mêmes implications en termes de projets politiques. Nous montrerons que la question de la propriété est au centre de ce qui les différencie. Un tableau de synthèse de ce raisonnement est présenté en annexe.

This study explored how social housing communities can contribute to the transition to a circular economy (CE) in cities. The CE promotes ways for rethinking and reshaping current practices of producing and consuming to enhance resource efficiency while satisfying our needs to enable us to prosper sustainably. Resource efficiency in cities relies on production and consumption patterns that are connected to people behaviours. Up to now, the CE has mainly concentrated on different levels of technological system innovations with limited attention to social practices and behavioural change. On the other side, communities and groups of interest show playing a crucial role in the promotion of sustainable practices through initiatives of social innovation (SI). Through case study analysis and comparison, the project investigated contemporary SI initiatives implemented by urban communities and groups of interest aiming at promoting alternative production-consumption practices. Seven types of SI for resource circularity have been identified. Based on this typology, the study defined potential opportunities, benefits and challenges for social housing communities. These findings also highlighted a complementary role that SI can play in the CE implementation in cities. Therefore, the project suggested the introduction of emerging SI concepts into the current CE approach to support development.

With the advent of smart cities (SCs), governance has been placed at the core of the debate on how to create public value and achieve a high quality of life in urban environments. In particular, given that public value is rooted in democratic theory and new technologies that promote networking spaces have emerged, citizen participation represents one of the principal instruments to make government open and close to the citizenry needs. Participation in urban governance has undergone a great development: from the first postmodernist ideals of countering expert dominance to today’s focus on learning and social innovation, where citizen participation is conceptualized as co-creation and co-production. Despite this development, there is a lack of research to know how this new governance context is taking place in the SC arena. Addressing this situation, in this article, we present an exhaustive survey of the research literature and a deep study of the experience in participative initiatives followed by SCs in Europe. Through an analysis of 149 SC initiatives from 76 European cities, we provide interesting insights about how participatory models have been introduced in the different areas and dimensions of the cities, how citizen engagement is promoted in SC initiatives, and whether the so-called creative SCs are those with a higher number of projects governed in a participatory way.

Le débat sur le rapport entre l’innovation sociale et les villes s’est élargi au cours des dernières décennies. Ce débat met en évidence l’intérêt suscité par les processus de coconstruction des savoirs dans les laboratoires vivants en innovation sociale (LVIS). Cet article a pour objectif de présenter une approche conceptuelle et analytique du traitement des LVIS, ainsi que de décrire et de mettre en perspective deux expériences de mise en oeuvre de LVIS dans les villes : l’Observatoire de l’innovation sociale de Florianópolis (OBISF) au Brésil et Territoires innovants en économie sociale et solidaire (TIESS) à Montréal au Canada. Bien qu’ils émergent dans des réalités et des contextes différents avec des méthodologies de mise en oeuvre spécifiques, qui sont présentées dans le texte, la discussion et l’analyse des deux cas apportent des pistes d’apprentissage sur les défis et les perspectives quant à la coconstruction des connaissances visant à renforcer les dynamiques d’innovation sociale à l’échelle d’une ville.

Innovation is perhaps the buzzword in local economic development policy. Associated narrowly with neoliberal ideas, conventional notions of innovation—like its capitalocentric counterparts, enterprise and entrepreneurialism—may promise higher productivity, global competitiveness and technological progress but do not fundamentally change the ‘rules of the game’. In contrast, an emerging field reimagines social innovation as disruptive change in social relations and institutional configurations. This article explores the conceptual and political differences within this pre‐paradigmatic field, and argues for a more transformative understanding of social innovation. Building on the work of David Graeber, I mobilize the novel constructs of ‘play’ and ‘games’ to advance our understanding of the contradictory process of institutionalizing social innovation for urban transformation. This is illustrated through a case study of Liverpool, where diverse approaches to innovation are employed in attempts to resolve longstanding socio‐economic problems. Dominant market‐ and state‐led economic development policies—likened to a ‘regeneration game’—are contrasted with more experimental, creative, democratic and potentially more effective forms of social innovation, seeking urban change through playing with the rules of the game. I conclude by considering how the play–game dialectic illuminates and reframes the way transformative social innovation might be cultivated by urban policy, the contradictions this entails, and possible ways forward.

Notre questionnement porte sur le profond décalage entre l'évolution de la pensée économique et les pratiques politiques issues de la décentralisation. Notre hypothèse met de l’avant que les logiques politiques mobilisées dans le cadre de ces réformes ne permettent pas d’accompagner le tournant territorial de l’économie (Pecqueur, 2006; Landel et Pecqueur, 2016). La difficulté des collectivités locales à prendre en compte et à accompagner l’innovation sociale témoigne de ces décalages. Pourtant, sous l’impulsion de l’État, de nouvelles formes de coordination s’affirment, parmi lesquelles on peut citer les pôles territoriaux de coopération économique (PTCE). Ils méritent d’être observés au regard de leur capacité à accompagner de nouvelles formes de développement territorial.

Studies on public sector innovation often treat this type of innovation as something that emerges within public sector organizations. However, innovation theory argues that external sources of innovation are more fruitful sources of ideas. We claim that universities must be treated as a mandatory element in public sector innovation. This paper is aimed at clarifying the place of public sector innovation in the classification of innovations currently used in the literature. It also seeks to conceptualize an approach for future research on the topic. Our primary goal is to identify the role of different actors in the development of public sector innovation. We analyze the advantages and disadvantages of different forms of university involvement in public sector innovation. The paper consists of two parts. The first defines concepts of innovation in general and public sector innovation viewed as a variation on social innovation. The second is dedicated to an analysis of the experience of Russian universities in enhancing collaboration between actors in the public innovation system.

This article extends the field conceptualisation of social change and innovation adoption, which hinges upon the strategic capacities of actors, to the online environment. We focus on a key aspect of social movement organisations (SMOs), competition for members, resources and attention over an environmental risk issue. The incorporation of network theory enables us to map how the structural position of actors in the field is associated with their actions – for example, their response to an exogenous shock such as a new threat to the environment. We analyse how actors in the online environmental movement respond to the emergence of nanoscience and technology (NST) as a risk issue, and test the field theory hypothesis that dominated actors are more likely to adopt this issue in the early stages of emergence. Our findings challenge field theory orthodoxy and suggest that whilst challengers innovate, dominants co-opt by adopting the issue in a second stage. Finally, we examine why the notion that NST entails significant environmental and health risks was not propelled into wider public consciousness.

People with disabilities are an important actor and target group in social innovation initiatives worldwide, as there is a clear need for better inclusion of this group in society. A way to improve the inclusion of people with disabilities is the development of assistive technology. In practice, people with disabilities often use technologies of which the primary use is not that of an assistive technology. They use the technology for a different use and context than the developer intended – termed 'secondary use'. The current paper studies the factors that are needed to make the secondary use of technology a success. First, a literature review and explorative study in the Netherlands are performed, after which a framework on the secondary use of technology for inclusion, specifically for people with disabilities, is developed.

The recent surge of investment in Civic Technologies represents a unique opportunity to realize the potential of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for improving democratic participation. In this review, we study what technologies are proposed and evaluated in the academic literature for such goal. We focus our exploration on how civic technology is used in the collaborative creation of solutions for social issues and innovations for public services (i.e., social innovation). Our goal is to provide researchers, designers, and practitioners a starting point to understand both the academic state of the art and the existing opportunities for ICT in a democracy.

The Syrian refugee crisis has been termed “the greatest humanitarian crisis of the last century” and countries around the world have stepped up to provide safe haven to millions of Syrians fleeing violence. Canada's unique private sponsorship policy coupled with government sponsorship of refugees saw more than 40,000 welcomed to Canada in a matter of months prompting the need for new processes and solutions. Grassroots organizations emerged, with new partnerships, processes and approaches enabled with new applications of simple technologies and revealed opportunities to leverage and amplify government resources. While fragmented and sometimes primitive these efforts signaled new opportunities to create an innovative “sharing economy” approach. This paper will review the relations between these new initiatives, actors and networks and the opportunities to drive systems change through a social innovation lens.

Some of the most important resources are intangible, such as knowledge and access to networks. In the developing world, technology can facilitate these resources and address basic human needs in a variety of ways: from provision of farmer training and cloud-controlled clean water systems to health information and mobile money services. Some of these services expand access to resources in ways that particularly benefit women. In environments where women are disadvantaged socially and economically, information and communications technologies (ICT) can enable women to access valuable information, consider a broader range of business opportunities, access wider markets, partake in educational programs, and share experiences with and gain mentorship from other women. However, there are large gender gaps in the access to technology, particularly in rural areas. To begin, I briefly discuss the role of technology in development, and consider the extent and significance of technology gender gaps. Next, I review key barriers to reducing these gaps, and discuss the concept of social innovation as it applies to technology interventions. Examples from five social innovations in India — a country with large technology gender gaps — illustrate the range of possibilities for innovative access to and use of ICT for diverse target groups. I conclude with some suggestions for further improvement in this area.

• Use Evolutionary Game to clarify the applicability of various resource allocations. • Expose the different key factors affecting the roles of resource allocations. • Breadth resource allocations have advantage when alliance environment is ambiguous. • Targeted resource allocations enhance the benefits if commercial prospects are clear. A lack of understanding regarding the roles and applicability of different resource allocations has become the underlying reason for the failure of resource efforts. Therefore, it is of important practical significance to examine the effects of different resource allocations and their impacts on the development of strategic alliances. Based on the development intentions of technological innovation cooperation and social capital accumulation, our study distinguished four patterns of resource allocation and viewed them as dynamic processes instead of unchanging decision results, using simulation from evolutionary game theory to explore the roles and applicability of various resource allocations by exposing their stability under different constraint situations. Our results indicate that, first, the randomly-oriented resource allocation has the highest probability of being unstable, while the knowledge-embedded resource allocation has the lowest probability. Second, randomly-oriented resource allocation can lead an alliance to become a pure technology or social alliance; relationship-oriented resource allocation is sensitive to opportunistic behavior, but more favorable to innovation diffusion; cooperation-oriented resource allocation is mainly affected by resource cost, and more suitable for firms with strong innovation intentions; and knowledge-embedded resource allocation is conducive to reducing the uncertainty and enhancing the configuration success rates. Third, the breadth of the resource allocation increases the probability of successfully configuring resources, and the strategic decision to switch from broad resource allocation to a targeted one may increase the extraneous benefits of firms when the development prospects are clear.

People Centered Social Innovation: Global perspectives on an Emerging Paradigm attempts to revisit and extend the existing understanding of Social Innovation in practice by focusing upon the lived realities of marginalized groups and communities. The emerging field of people-centered development is placed in dialogue with theory and concepts from the more established field of social innovation to create a new approach; one that adopts a global perspective, engaging with very different experiences of marginality across the global north and south. Theoretically, ‘People Centered Social Innovation: Global Perspectives on an Emerging Paradigm’ draws upon ‘northern’ understandings of change and improvement as well as ‘southern’ theory concerns for epistemological diversity and meaning making. The result is an experiment aimed at reimagining research and practice that seriously needs to center the actor in processes of social transformation.

The United States wastes approximately 40% of its food supply. This article will examine the implications of this waste for food insecurity and climate change. It will also explore how the law and social entrepreneurship can be used to confront this public health challenge.

Two things often observed in children: (1) many do not eat a healthy diet and (2) they like playing video-games. Game-based learning has proven to be an effective method for attitude change, and thus has the potential to influence children's eating habits. This study looks at how, through a series of workshop activities, children themselves can inform the design of such games. Using a co-constructive approach, the study's format promotes creativity and control, enabling children to act as valuable informants for its design. Patterns emerging from the study show that children do indeed understand the concept of healthy eating. Future phases of this work will explore whether they understand how various foods affect their bodies. This information will then inform the design of a video-game that encourages healthy eating.

This paper reports on a long-term collaboration with a self-organised social clinic, within solidarity movements in Greece. The collaboration focused on the co-creation of an oral history group within the social clinic, aiming to record and make sense of a collection of digital oral histories from its volunteers and volunteers-doctors. The process aimed to support reflection and shape the future of the clinic's ongoing social innovation and to transform institutional public health services. Positioning the work of solidarity movement as designing social innovation, the work contributes to CSCW and 'infrastructuring' in Participatory Design aspiring to support social activism and social transformation processes. More specifically, through our empirical insights on the process of infrastructuring an oral history group within a social movement; and related insights about their ongoing participatory health service provision-we provide implications for CSCW concerned with its role in institutional healthcare service transformation.

This book explores how the State can play a role as an enabler of citizens-led social innovations, to accelerate the shift to sustainable and socially just lifestyles. To meet the twin challenges of environmental degradation and the rise of inequalities, societal transformation is urgent. Most theories of social change focus either on the role of the State, on the magic of the market, or on the power of technological innovation. This book explores instead how local communities, given the freedom to experiment, can design solutions that can have a transformative impact. Change cannot rely only on central ordering by government, nor on corporations suddenly acting as responsible citizens. Societal transformation, at the speed and scope required, also should be based on the reconstitution of social capital, and on new forms of democracy emerging from collective action at the local level. The State matters of course, for the provision of both public services and of social protection, and to discipline the market, but it should also act as an enabler of citizen-led experimentation, and it should set up an institutional apparatus to ensure that collective learning spreads across jurisdictions. Corporations themselves can ensure that society taps the full potential of citizens-led social innovations: they can put their know-how, their access to finance, and their control of logistical chains in the service of such innovations, rather than focusing on shaping consumers’ tastes or even adapting to consumers’ shifting expectations. With this aim in mind, this book provides empirical evidence of how social innovations, typically developed within "niches", initially at a relatively small scale, can have society-wide impacts. It also examines the nature of the activism deployed by social innovators, and the emergence of a "do-it-yourself" form of democracy. This book will appeal to all those interested in driving societal change and social innovation to ensure a sustainable and socially just future for all.

The aim of this paper is to study the influence of corporate social responsibility (CSR) over small and medium‐sized enterprise (SME) innovation and the effect of two mediating variables, debt terms and human capital. Based on a sample of 2825 Spanish SMEs and applying a structural equations modeling, the results demonstrate that the effect of CSR on innovation is mediated by debt terms and by good human resource practices. Part of the positive effect of CSR on innovation occurs through these two variables, which, alone, positively and significantly affect innovation in SMEs. Consequently, the positive effect of CSR practices on debt terms through a decrease in asymmetric information goes further, also having repercussions on innovation. Additionally, the suitable development of human resource practices based on strategies oriented toward CSR allow companies to carry out greater and more efficient innovative activities. This paper contributes to the CSR literature considering the human resource management and the debt access in the relationship between CSR and innovation. The findings reveal important implications for policy makers and managers. For the former, the results show that it would be interesting to carry out actions aimed at assisting SMEs, especially those with fewer resources available, to implement a suitable CSR strategy, supporting sustainable development in SMEs. And, for the latter, CSR‐oriented innovation has proven to be a valuable strategy for more efficient SMEs management because of the multiple competitive advantages it generates.

The growing presence of new players – beside those belonging to the institutional and third sectors – committed to supporting social and environmental causes through innovative approaches and tools leads to the profile of a for-profit enterprise increasingly committed to the pursuit of social goals. In the paper, the authors focus their attention on the existence of relationships between innovation and a company's social role in order to assess how innovation affects the social conduct of profit-making enterprises and to determine the birth of a new "hybrid" business model. In order to achieve this goal, research was carried out on a sample of 4,000 Italian Small and Medium-sized Enterprises that claim to operate according to a corporate social commitment, in order to investigate the existence of a relationship between innovative behavior and social and business purposes of companies having different Corporate Social Innovation policies. The data were analyzed using the conditional inference tree, a non-parametric class of tree regression model, which overcomes different regression problems involving ordinal and nominal variables. The results achieved make it possible to fill some gaps in the existing literature, to detect a relationship between technological and social commitment in a company and to open a debate on future research developments.