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This study examines the influence of digitalisation and social entrepreneurship on national well-being. Taking a configurational approach, the results show that digitalisation can benefit national well-being if the country has an adequate educational system, good governance, and a philanthropy-oriented financial system. Digitalisation can leverage these conditions in promoting national well-being. The study also contributes to entrepreneurship literature as it clarifies the role of social entrepreneurship. Social entrepreneurship impacts national well-being when institutions are weak, but it is indifferent in developed economies, which gives support to the institutional void perspective. This finding contributes to the ongoing debate on the role of the institutions on the creation of social enterprises and advances knowledge on the social impact of social entrepreneurship. Additionally, the results show that a combination of conditions is required to achieve high levels of national well-being.

Although social innovation is an old paradigm, social innovation courses appeared in the curricula in the approximately last ten years. By doing so educational institutions acknowledged the existence of new approaches to obstacles that the world is facing. The courses regarding the social innovations give the students valuable knowledge and skills related to solving different social problems, increasing the motivation for being active in the society, and raising awareness about specific topics that need attention. An important role in implementing social innovation have ICT technologies. The role of the ICT is multiple: (1) administrative (members of the certain social initiative collaborate on the project through different ICT tools that enable communication and information organization), (2) disseminative and educational (the topic of the social initiative is disseminated through different tools and social media), and sometimes (3) topical (it the topic of social innovation project is directly connected to specific ICT technology). Based on the roles that the ICT takes upon in the process of social innovation implementation, the authors present ICT solutions that could be included in the realization of a social innovation course for business students at the graduate level.

Understanding the criteria for the formation and development of social innovation ecosystems is crucial to establish appropriate strategies for their creation, maintenance and expansion. In this regard, strategies should be focused on social development actions, mainly supported by governments and members of the society. Silva, Sá and Spinosa (2019) reinforce that the interaction between government, industry and academia, coined in the literature as Triple Helix, by Etzkowitz and Leydesdorff (2000), has been increasingly recognized for driving the transformation of scientific and technological results into economic results. According to a study by Schaffers et. al (2012), the progress towards the understanding of the intersection between urban economy, innovation networks, technology platforms, services and their applications, collective intelligence and innovation theories themselves is one of the challenges for innovation. This understanding can help scholars, governments and professionals to explore new directions and produce knowledge and solutions to make cities smarter. This study aimed to carry on a previous study by Nespolo and Fachinelli (2017) as well as build and validate a scale to measure the perception of social innovation ecosystems.

The purpose of this paper is to present the factors that should be taken into consideration when assessing the level of acceptance of an ICT solution by the general public, as well as the innovating impact that such solution is expected to have at the level of society in the European Union. This involves the integration of social and technical skills and expertise, in order to gather the necessary feedback from the users in a clear and concise way. The final goal is to provide an online service that improves the quality of life and work of its users. In order to do so, such service needs to be capable of performing in a way that is as effortless as possible for the user, who will in turn be motivated to use it repeatedly. Moreover, the content of the online service must be able to address a social need in a way that is more efficient and novel than what has been available until then.

Whereas the economic impact of universities is undisputed, the social impact of universities remains vague. The purpose of this paper is to examine whether and how universities influence firms’ social engagement. Based on survey data of more than 7,000 German firms, our results reveal that universities positively affect firms’ social engagement mainly through teaching activities. Hence, our findings give impetus to a reinforcement of the university mission ‘teaching’ as a central lever for social change and increased social awareness as well as to a reorientation of the third university mission toward social needs. This paper thereby contributes to our understanding of the changing missions and values of universities and adds to the literature by exploring the underlying mechanisms of the social impact of universities. We conclude the paper with fruitful future avenues of research.

The coronavirus disease of 2019 (COVID-19) swiftly changed almost all aspects of our lives and society. In this paper, we depict course adjustments that we made to an undergraduate digital innovation course project, called Innovation Farm (IF), in response to the pandemic. Designed as an in-person course project, IF requires students to create AIpowered Android apps to address important social issues. As stay-at-home orders came into effect in March, 2020, we shifted the course to the online modality refocused its student topics to address social issues that COVID-19 has engendered. Accordingly, we also discuss three challenges that we faced and the strategies we employed to cope with them; namely, framing students' social innovation topics in the COVID-19 context, using virtual studios for online groupwork, and hosting a virtual pitch competition. Surprisingly, these strategies not only addressed the challenges but also created unintended benefits and opportunities. We hope to encourage educators to consider the possibilities in transforming challenges to opportunities during these unprecedented times.

This book explores the nexus between professional technical societies and engineering education by examining several societies' efforts to promote and support engineering and engineering education in the areas of pre-university education, university education and informal education through programs and activities designed to leverage social innovation. Professional societies are in a unique position to support and contribute to engineering education, and have dedicated substantial resources to social responsibility programs and activities that promote engineers and engineering. The book is chiefly intended for engineers, engineering educators, staff members of professional technical societies, and for the broad range of scholars whose work involves technology education and education policy.

This study analyses the importance of teaching social entrepreneurship in state universities. A survey was applied to university students to find out if personality traits are related to the characteristics of social entrepreneurship. This was achieved through Alpha Cronbach and Pearson/Spearman correlation analysis. The results show that students have the personality traits to become social entrepreneurs. However, social entrepreneurship courses are not taught in universities of Tijuana city. Therefore, it is strongly suggested to teach social entrepreneurship in universities of the city and the state because students possess social entrepreneurship traits and are interested in the subject.

The socioeconomic challenges caused by aging populations have encouraged many countries to reevaluate the place of the elderly in society as well as to adopt measures in encouraging them to be participative. In recent decades, crowdsourcing has been identified as a rapid growth of innovative Internet-based information and communication technologies in giving the opportunities to educational organizations to reach their goals. With their accumulated skills and knowledge, academic retirees can be resourceful to society. However, their knowledge and experiences seem to be undervalued and underutilized. Retired academics have better opportunity to extend their contribution in the society as their valuable knowledge is more appreciated than people from other background. Retired academics tend to be able to fulfill their desire for professional continuity following retirement more markedly than people from other backgrounds. This paper analyzes the use of crowdsourcing in educational activities, especially for the academic retirees. Therefore, the objectives of this paper are to take an exploratory look on how educational organizations use crowdsourcing as part of their activities at the present time, and to suggest how the practice of crowdsourcing may expand to other educational activities in future.

Educating social innovators in higher education is of great importance as many societal challenges exist. This study combines experiential learning with ICT tools to provide students with the needed competences and experiences to solve societal challenges. We employ this approach in an innovative course, named Experts in Teamwork (EiT), which follows the experiential learning cycle. The participants of this study are undergraduate students interested to learn how they can solve societal challenges. Specifically, 26 students with various background and nationalities participated. A collaborative platform was developed that supports teamwork and cooperation, as well as the social innovation process. The findings show that this approach can influence positively learning outcomes and increase students' engagement and motivation with both social innovation and the learning process. Also, students' creativity was increased leading to the development of better solutions. The overall outcomes contribute to theoretical and practical development, to allow educators to take appropriate measures to enhance students' learning experience and foster social innovation through ICT.

“Many suppliers and users of social research are dissatisfied, the former because they are not listened to, the latter because they do not hear much they want to listen to” (Lindblom & Cohen, 1979: 1). As mentioned in Chapter 1 of this book, the recent events of global financial crisis and a series of Occupy Wall Street protests have raised reflections of business management education on MBA trainings. The question of whether management research and education can be a facilitator toward events that would eventually destroy the world economy or a facilitator toward achieving social value and human glory has been raised with those reflections. MBA graduates should not be used as profiting tools for big corporations anymore. Moreover, the separation between management theory and industry practice has, for a long time, caused a dilemma with regard to the difficulties inherent in dialogue between academia and industry. There have been urgent calls to embody management research into applicable industry knowledge in order to minimize the gap in between the two (Anderson, Herriot, & Hodgkinson, 2001; Rynes, Bartunek, & Daft, 2001; Van de Yen & Johnson, 2006).

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.

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.

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.