Social Innovation is a slippery term. It is able to generate much idealism, while it offers itself for all kinds of projection, ad hosting aspirations of all kinds of ideological realms. As a consequence, SI is a ‘loose’ notion, with ambiguous analytical rigour.
Yet in 2009, Pol and Ville claimed that ‘Social innovation’ is a term that almost everyone likes, but nobody is quite sure of what it means. Hulgård and Ferreira document how four different schools of public administration thought co-opt the concept with fundamentally different prescriptions. All four discourses claim the floating signifier of SI and attach their respective recipes under the aura it irradiates. The European Anti-Poverty Network has attempted to define a ten-criteria catalogue of meaningful social innovation to reduce poverty and social exclusion.
In exchange with practitioners, it is often pointed out that many projects call themselves SI, while they are not, possibly generated by the current SI hype and funding flow. On the other hand, there are initiatives that indeed are SI, while their promotors would never conceive themselves in such terms.
Along the social innovation spiral (see our post “Social Innovation – what is it for us?”), SI scholars have raised a number of questions. Amongst these are the following:
- (How) can innovation processes be triggered and systematically supported in each of the stages? What skills and tools are needed for mentoring SI? What are the conditions that foster and impede SI processes? Can they be shaped from outside?
- What role for finance, whether public or philanthropy?
- How do SI projects manage to develop a viable business model?
- Who are the drivers, whether individual visionaries or collective intelligence? What skills set is needed in each of the phases?
- How to establish evidence to measure success, failure, or the future potential?
- Beyond the specific outcome how can ‘collateral’ outcomes, such as learning processes or empowerment, be considered and systematically measured?
- How do the respective logics of private for-profit, state action, social economy and third sector, and community interact? Can colonizing, crowding-out, extraction, and co-optation be avoided? What models of cooperation and alliances exist?
- What role for public policy?
As visualized below, much of the publications on SI situate themselves either as: theoretical capturing of definitions; listing of exemplary projects; or mapping of cases.
It usually presents a challenge to descent from the often highly abstract theorising to the listing of processes or tools, and vice versa. This table give some examples
| Representation | Examples |
| Theoretical capturing of definitions | H. Anheier et al., 2018; |
| Listing of exemplary projects and mapping of cases | EC, 2020 |
| Toolboxes to “do SI” | EC 2013; |
Some exceptions are those publications that aim to gather a series of tools and practices under a theoretical frame, such as the Tepsie guides for practitioners, policy-makers or researchers, the SI Atlas, or the HIP hexagon of the LAAAB Social Innovation Laboratory in Aragon (Spain).
