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The aim of this study is to provide new insights into the social innovation (SI) development process in the context of social start-ups. A multiple case study identifies the issues and mechanisms for social start-ups to develop a social need into a potentially scalable innovation and to validate and scale it up, while avoiding a possible failure. Results show that key challenges faced by social start-ups can be characterized according to the stage of the SI development path. Firstly, social start-ups' failure can be caused by the lack of expertise in social problems and of flexible processes for social ventures creation; secondly, by the lack of awareness of SI benefits and proper resources allocation; and, finally, by a weak understanding of the impact and intangible outcomes of the developed SI in society, while ensuring its economic sustainability. Successfully overcoming these challenges requires social start-ups to put in place the following mechanisms: (1) leveraging a vision and motivations that balance tensions in terms of the radical, economic and cultural aspects of SI; (2) engaging the SI stakeholders in different (and sequential) phases of SI development process; and (3) identifying and adopting the most suitable technological, financial and communication tools in an integrated way.

The purpose of this paper is to explore multiple Canadian educators' experiences with the Map the System (MTS) competition, designed to foster and grow systems thinking capacity among students exploring complex questions. The challenge has been an opportunity for social innovation programs (from the nascent to the established) across Canadian post-secondaries to engage both with their own communities and with social innovators internationally, connecting social innovation spaces as part of their third mission. Across the organizations, students valued the interdisciplinary and systems thinking qualities, and organizations benefited from the external competition, there remain questions about organizational engagement in social innovation as a deeply transformative process internally. Design/methodology/approach All Canadian post-secondary institutions who participated in the 2020 MTS competition (17) were invited to a digital roundtable to discuss their experiences. Ten were able to participate, representing a range of post-secondaries (including large research institutions, undergraduate-only universities and colleges). To facilitate discussion, participants met to discuss format and topics; for the roundtable itself, participant educators used a google form to capture their experiences. These were summarized, anonymized and redistributed for validation and clarification. To reflect this collaborative approach, all participant educators are listed as authors on this paper, alphabetically after the organizing authors. Findings For students participating in MTS, they have built both their interdisciplinary and systems thinking skills, as well as their commitment to achieving meaningful change in their community. But MTS arrived in fertile environments and acted as an accelerant, driving attention, validation and connection. Yet while this might align with post-secondary education’s third mission, educators expressed concerns about sustainability, internal commitment to change and navigating tensions between a challenge approach and collaborative work, and internal work and national competition limitations. This complicates the simple insertion of MTS in a post-secondary’s social innovation-related third mission. Research limitations/implications This study was limited to Canadian post-secondaries participating in MTS, and therefore are not representative of either post-secondaries in Canada, or all the MTS participants although Canada is well represented in the challenge itself. Additionally, while the authors believe their approach to treat all participants as authors, and ensured multiple feedback opportunities in private and collectively, this is a deliberate and potentially controversial move away from a traditional study. Social implications More than half of Canadian universities (a subgroup of post-secondaries) had at least one social innovation initiative, but questions have been raised about whether these initiatives are being evaluated internally, or are triggering the kinds of transformative internal work that might be an outcome. Understanding the impact of MTS one example of a social innovation-related initiative can help advance the broader conversation about the place (s) for social innovation in the post-secondary landscape – and where there is still significant work to be done. Originality/value As Canada has only participated in MTS for four years, this is the first inter-institution consideration of its related opportunities and obstacles as a vehicle for transformational social innovation. As well, educators talking openly and frankly to educators reinforces the collaborative quality of social innovation across the post-secondary landscape.

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.

The UK government has called for a rehabilitation revolution in England and Wales and put its faith in market testing. It hopes this will lead to greater innovation, resulting in reductions in re-offending while also driving down costs. However, many of the most innovative developments in criminal justice over recent decades have come through social innovation. Examples include restorative justice and justice reinvestment. In this article we argue that while social innovation will respond to some extent to conventional economic policy levers such as market testing, de-regulation and the intelligent use of public sector purchasing power it is not simply an extension of the neo-liberal model into the social realm. Social innovation, based on solidarity and reciprocity, is an alternative to the logic of the neo-liberal paradigm. In policy terms, the promotion of social innovation will need to take account of the interplay between government policy, social and cultural norms and individual and social capacity. Current proposals for reforming the criminal justice system may not leave sufficient scope to develop the conditions for effective social innovation.

The incubator model of a support structure to develop high-tech firms from academic research was imported from the USA to Brazil, where it serves a variety of economic and social purposes. The Brazilian cooperative incubator is a creative reinterpretation of the business incubator model to advance social innovation. It addresses issues of social exclusion, poverty and unemployment by empowering favela residents to create their own jobs. Having diffused broadly, the Brazilian cooperative incubator allows us to address the issue of growth in social enterprises. This paper employs a triple helix dynamic model, including government (local, regional and national), academic (different types of universities, industry (firms of varying scale and sector, industry associations) and NGOs (non governamental organizations) to explain the diffusion and expansion of this innovation in social entrepreneurship.

Reputation systems are a popular feature of web-based platforms for ensuring that their users abide by platform rules and regulations and are incentivized to demonstrate honest, trustworthy conduct. Accrual of "reputation" in these platforms, most prominently those in the e-commerce domain, is motivated by self-interested goals such as acquiring an advantage over competing platform users. Therefore, in community-oriented platforms, where the goals are to foster collaboration and cooperation among community members, such reputation systems are inappropriate and indeed contrary to the intended ethos of the community and actions of its members. In this article, we argue for a new form of reputation system that encourages cooperation rather than competition, derived from conceptualizing platform communities as a networked assemblage of users and their created content. In doing so, we use techniques from social network analysis to conceive a form of reputation that represents members' community involvement over a period of time rather than a sum of direct ratings from other members. We describe the design and implementation of our reputation system prototype called "commonshare" and preliminary results of its use within a Digital Social Innovation platform. Further, we discuss its potential to generate insight into other networked communities for their administrators and encourage cooperation between their users.

Digital social innovation (DSI) involves the use of digital technologies in the development and implementation of innovative products, services, processes and business models that seek to improve the well-being and agency of socially disadvantaged groups or address social problems related to marginality, inequality and social exclusion (Qureshi, Pan, & Zheng, 2017; Shalini et al., 2021). Information Systems Frontiers, 22 (11), 1 - 21. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10796-020-09991-6 153 Parthiban, R., Qureshi, I., Bandyopadhyay, S., & Jaikumar, S. (2021). Social inclusion/exclusion (Diaz Andrade & Doolin, 2016; Iivari et al., 2018; Riaz & Qureshi, 2017); social inequality (Qureshi et al., 2018; Zheng & Walsham, 2008, 2021) Embedded agency of DSIrs How are DSIrs able to engage with local institutions yet bring change in these very same institutions? 151 Pandey, M., Bhati, M., Shukla, D. M., & Qureshi, I. (2021). 152 Parthiban, R., Qureshi, I., Bandyopadhyay, S., Bhatt, B., & Jaikumar, S. (2020).

This article responds to increasing discourses on digital social innovation (DSI) from the perspectives of women entrepreneurs. Using the individual differences theory of gender and information technology (IDTGIT), this research explores how digital technology is used by women entrepreneurs to create opportunities in response to the challenges associated with individual identity, individual influences, social influences and structural influences. We also extend the IDTGIT by exploring how technology is used by women entrepreneurs in their DSI ventures and how technology facilitates the social impact of such ventures. This paper draws on a qualitative study using interviews with 17 women entrepreneurs in Australia, and our findings indicate that individual identity, individual influences and social and structural influences play a significant role in inhibiting women entrepreneurs' business ventures but technology helps to create opportunities for women entrepreneurs to address these factors. We also found that technology plays a role in helping women entrepreneurs to pursue social innovation in two different ways: through social innovation that is embodied by technology and social innovation that is enabled by technology. Our findings further indicate the social impact of DSI in the areas of education, employment, environment and climate, community development and progress and healthcare. The theoretical and practical implications of DSI for women entrepreneurs are provided.

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.

In the last two decades, social innovation (SI) and social entrepreneurship (SE) have gained relevance and interest within the framework of academia at international level. Higher education institutions (HEIs) are key players in promoting innovation and social entrepreneurship initiatives that respond to multifaceted challenges. They support strategies on the basis of the strengthening of participation, collaboration, and cooperation with society and its local communities. However, the approach of Latin American universities to SI and SE has been very uneven in the way they have understood them, integrated them into academic programmes, and transferred knowledge to society. On the basis of the experience of the Students4Change project, we sought to understand the role of Latin American HEIs in promoting social innovations by analysing the experiences of 10 participating universities to formalise a pedagogical programme on SI and SE in their institutions. The results suggest that there is still a need to formalise an academic syllabus that is specifically designed to promote social innovations and to train universities in this endeavour. This paper contributes to the identification of the main levers of change, strengths, and challenges that Latin American universities face to institutionalise SI and SE in their contexts.

L’Union européenne comme les pouvoirs publics français peinent à trouver des solutions aux crises agricoles. Le secteur laitier n’échappe pas à la règle. En 2016, quelque 7000 consommateurs français ont activement participé à la coconstruction d’une filière laitière guidée par un objectif social : améliorer les conditions de vie des producteurs. L’innovation repose ainsi sur une nouvelle méthode de fixation du prix de vente du lait conditionné. Nous montrerons par cet exemple ainsi que par d’autres exemples en France que ce type de coconstruction constitue une innovation sociale inversée. Cette dernière tire parti d’un demi-siècle d’apprentissage fondé sur l’institutionnalisation du « caractère équitable » d’un bien, lequel est au coeur du commerce équitable Nord-Sud. Le label « équitable » n’est donc plus réservé aux seuls pays en développement. Nous analyserons également la portée des technologies numériques (TN) qui réduisent la « distance sociale » entre producteurs, implantés au Sud ou au Nord, et consommateurs. Ainsi, les consommateurs peuvent arbitrer à travers les TN, et ce, dans plusieurs filières.

Purpose – This paper aims to illustrate how dispersed institutes of social innovation operating as intermediary actors within higher education institutions (HEIs) may help overcome many of the institutional bureaucracies and structures that inhibit social innovation in higher education.

This paper presents the state of the art in promoting social innovation at five leading technical universities in Europe. We assess how these leading technical universities implement social innovation in their strategies, teaching, and research. The results show that all universities highlight the importance of finding solutions to global challenges and addressing Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) as a fundamental university strategy for example by promoting social innovation. Moreover, all address the universities’ need to contribute to sustainability and the Sustainable Development Goals. However, social innovation does not play an important role in research and teaching as the results show that social innovation has so far been little addressed in research and teaching. Based on the political framework in the five European countries, we draw up conclusions for technical universities

The interactions between the higher education sector and society and industry have been attracting increased attention in terms of ways to develop social innovation solutions to societal problems. Despite calls from politicians and the existence of some guidelines, we know little about how higher education could incorporate social innovation activities into its structure and missions. This study examines some practice experiences in two southern European public universities in Portugal and Spain. We show that the third mission of universities, which includes social innovation, is both linked to the first two missions of teaching and research, depending on the university’s historical and social context. The high dependence of higher education institutions on economic returns increases the importance of political action to drive the development of social innovation activities. This conditioning factor seems to be intrinsic to some of the barriers that have been identified, such as lack of legitimization and recognition of social innovation practices at the formal governmental level.

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.

The fast pace of change brought on by advances in technology have led to significant pressure on companies to innovate to remain competitive and able to meet shareholders' demands. This paper reviews and explores the longitudinal development of business models between 1999 and 2019, focusing specifically on social hubs, as a co-working space for sharing knowledge. The academic literature gives limited empirical examination of social hubs and the extent to which social hub business models are sustainable. This paper (i) critically reviews and draws out the relevant concepts, namely, business model innovation, social innovation and social hubs; (ii) provides a workable definition for the new terminology of social innovation hubs; (iii) develops a deeper understanding of the role of business model innovation in social innovation hubs. The findings show that business model innovation and social innovation are underdeveloped in the literature. Moreover, the social hub business model requires further empirical research in order to capture value creation and sustain financial performance. Recommendations are made for further research to help guide social hubs towards delivering more value-added services to startups and SMEs.

L’objectif de cette contribution est d’analyser les rôles que peuvent jouer les communautés de pratique dans des démarches d’exploration nécessitant de l’innovation collective. L’analyse se fonde sur une étude longitudinale de 16 mois. Les résultats montrent que des communautés de pratique dédiées à des méthodes d’exploration peuvent jouer un rôle majeur dans l’ouverture des processus d’innovation d’une organisation. Dépassant les fonctions d’un intermédiaire d’innovation, ces collectifs autonomes accompagnent cette dynamique en sensibilisant et en légitimant l’importance d’explorer certains enjeux d’innovation avec des partenaires, en structurant et en animant des démarches d’innovation collective, tout en interprétant et documentant les apprentissages et les résultats liés à ces initiatives.

Artisanal and small-scale gold mining in the Amazonian countries has undergone important technological improvements in recent decades. Nevertheless, this type of mining is largely associated with the use of rudimentary, low-tech and often manual methods, with inefficient gold recovery. This article aims at investigating how innovations and improvements in the technology used in small-scale gold mines are connected to a broader perception of the miners about the integration of more modern and effective techniques. A technographical approach enabled the understanding of mining practices as embodied cultural knowledge and to fill the information gap between the study of materials and techniques with the study of people and communities. We discuss how the technology of small-scale gold mining in the region of Peixoto de Azevedo (Mato Grosso, Brazil) has changed since the early 1980s, giving particular attention to the recent introduction of two main innovations: the mechanized exploration drill and the cyanidation process. In this region, miners are successfully organized in cooperatives efforts to mutually reinforce the integration of innovative and effective techniques. Finally, we introduce the three notions of foresight (visão), agility (agilidade) and development (desenvolvimento) that emerged during fieldwork and conceptually frame the likeliness of acceptance and promulgation of innovations in this context. Sustainable mining may only succeed if a wider vision of the future of the sector (foresight) joins public policies that facilitate the practical process of innovation during each phase of its realization (agility) in order to achieve an advanced social status of the local community (development). Highlights • Technological innovation is connected to miners' perception of appropriate practices. • A sustainable mining occurs when technological innovation joins social innovation. • Foresight, agility and development are key concept for adopting technical innovation. • Forming local cooperatives ease the development of the small-scale mining sector.

This paper aims to present how contemporary students are self-organizing using smart technologies (ST) and the future social implications of ST. The research model is based on the concepts of the soft system methodology, social systems thinking, innovative smart systems, and cybernetic and knowledge management. Design/methodology/approach The study contains elements of exploratory and descriptive case studies. Narrative analysis and interpretation of the collected data have been carried out. Findings Students mostly use ST to save time when studying and in their free time. Students are surprised by how ST developed and are cautious when imagining how the technology will change and affect their lives. They are concerned regarding several ethical dilemmas of using it, such as privacy and spending time with their loved ones and friends. Students perceive their self-organization in the future as very dependent on the availability of ST in institutional settings (e.g. education and business process) as well as their personal lives. Students discuss their present perceptions about what the future will be and note that social system will be more dynamic in terms of socialization, and loss of personal contact with their friends and family is seen as the main threat. Research limitations/implications The research is qualitative, and the questionnaire was carried out among business students at the Faculty of Economics, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia. Practical implications The paper offers an understanding of the usage of ST among business students. This study provides a road map of a few possible ways for usage of ST among students. The topic is also relevant for human resource managers, technology developers and marketing strategists for their better understanding of the behaviour of young people using ST in professional or private environments. Social implications The findings can be useful for professors in identifying different learning methods that are useful for their students. Originality/value The authors offer conceptualizations of ST within the social innovation framework and provide a contemporary understanding young people’s ST usage.

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.