The Impact of Social Innovation

This chapter addresses key questions in terms of the evaluation of the impact of social innovation processes. After reviewing the existing approaches to capturing impact, the chapter presents a new Critical Issues Framework for social impact measurement to inform the development of the most appropriate and accurate evaluative space for data collection and analysis. As such it advocates standardization in the process of developing social impact indicators and methodologies, rather than in the metrics and units of analysis themselves. This framework is related to the three elements of the Social Grid in so far as they shape normative models of social impact measurement that entrench marginalization and limit stakeholder voice. Moreover, particular attention is paid to issues around capturing changes in human capabilities and how this relates to beneficiary empowerment and voice. The chapter, thus, offers a framework for optimizing impact measurement processes and systems.

Trajectories of Social Innovation

The chapter analyses the specific features of social innovation for marginalized (SIM) or even socially excluded people, using the example of a social microcredit programme. It offers a review of the marginalization of the Roma in Hungary, considering the major factors of becoming marginalized as well as the processes reproducing marginalization, stressing the impacts of interactions between institutions, networks, and cognitive frames, showing that the complex nature of the reproduction of marginalization requires complex interventions, including empowering and capability building. The chapter highlights several policy and practical implications, including trade-offs to be considered when planning and implementing SIMs—in particular, those between exact targeting in a SIM versus building inter-community connections; the degree of assistance provided versus the short-term empowerment effect; and the degree of marginalization of the participants versus the costs of a given SIM.

Trajectories of Social Innovation

The chapter deals with the trajectory of social housing as a social innovation in European countries from the nineteenth century to the present. The long-term analysis of this comprehensive case study is guided by the Extended Social Grid Model (ESGM). Following a short description of seven different phases of social housing, the chapter turns to the role of social powers and the capability approach. All in all, the involvement of various actors and social networks in shaping a successful innovation becomes visible. Another important point is the insight that social innovations have to adjust to ever changing contexts du their trajectory. The analysis sheds light on supporting conditions of successful social innovations and reflects on the co-evolution of social and business innovations.

Creating Fair (Economic) Space for Social Innovation? A Capabilities Perspective

Economic space for social innovation is not bounded by markets. Further to the money-based exchange relations in markets, there is self and informal provision based on social norms such as reciprocity, community, public provision of entitlements and of public goods organized via political processes, and professional provision based on expert knowledge. Although these ideal-types blur in practice, they show the rich contours and collaborative pluralism of economic space. Fostering fair space for social innovation requires taking all these modes and their relations into account. Social innovations as messages signal to the public where a change in mode or a reconfiguration of modes is demanded. Fairness as a matter of taking the perspective of those marginalized and least advantaged, calls for evaluative scrutiny with respect to such messages: do social innovations empower beneficiaries to become agents; and do they consider their well-being as patients?

Capital and Capacities

Marginalization has many dimensions. One significant dimension can be characterized as ‘credit marginalization’—lack of access to capital on terms that derive from circumstances of the user of capital rather than the demands of the providers of capital. It is this aspect of marginalization that this chapter focuses on. Credit marginalization is due to a one-sided focus on material growth, the solution to which is to widen our understanding of capital as it relates to capabilities or capacities (i.e. non-material growth). Linking capital and capacities requires ‘open access credit’ (OAC)—or a change in the conditions on which capital is made available to individuals that is enabling in terms of capacities—with whatever consequences this may have in terms of the cultural, political, and economic aspects of social life.

Social Innovation and Agency

This chapter provides empirical insights of agency and empowerment in social innovation across Europe. We apply portions of the theoretical framework developed in CrESSI to investigate whether social innovation is potentially able to reduce the marginalization of specific groups. We depart from the hypothesis that social innovation enhances participants’ agency and test this through the collection of primary data. Our investigation is based on a mixed-method strategy combining qualitative interviews with social innovators, focus groups, and surveys to which beneficiaries and control groups respond. The case studies comprise Solidarity Purchasing Groups in Italy, interest communities that fight for decentralized drinking-water supply and wastewater removal in Germany, and complementary currencies in The Netherlands. Our results suggest that social innovation produces mainly intangible effects by modifying knowledge and social ties, which tend to improve the agency of participants.

Empirical Approaches to Social Innovation

This chapter describes two empirical approaches with which social innovation and its potentially transformative role can be studied. Both are oriented towards the Extended Social Grid Model (ESGM) and strive to bring its abstract categories on the ground and facilitate empirical analyses; first an analysis of long-term comprehensive case studies; and second a mixed-method approach inspired by the capability approach for evaluating the impact of social innovations. Both approaches enter new ground in social innovation research and supply valuable insights into the nature of social innovation and how it can be examined. The historical approach reveals the complexities of social innovation trajectories; the agency oriented approach of the more quantitative study opens new paths for a measurement of social innovation impacts that can be applied in many situations.

Social Innovation, Power, and Marginalization

The neo-Weberian theoretical model, which Michael Mann presents in his The Sources of Social Power, reduces the multitude of relations of interaction in social networks to ideological, economic, military, and political sources of social power. Taking Mann’s IEMP model as its point of departure this chapter makes an attempt to develop such an approach in the theory of innovation, which would go beyond the ordinary dichotomy between technological and social innovation, recognizing instead that there are several types of innovation and there is a social aspect to all of them. By integrating Mann’s approach to the Social Grid model (Beckert 2010), the capabilities approach to well-being (Sen 1999; Nussbaum 2000) and to an extension of the IEMP model to a NACEMP model, which also includes nature (N), artefacts (A), and the whole culture (C) as sources of power, a new approach to power, innovations, and marginalization is outlined.

Social Innovation Policy

This chapter addresses key issues that public policy seeking to support social innovation faces. Combining theoretical insights of the Extended Social Grid Model with empirical results obtained from EU policy surveys and case studies, it identifies key policy implications and recommendations. It first introduces key notions for social innovation policy, including the multifaceted landscape into which support is inserted; the necessity to recognize its political character; to what extent insights from business innovation studies can be useful; and why successful support of social innovation must imply institutional change. The chapter then outlines a series of recurrent policy dilemmas such as whether horizontal support should be preferred; the trade-off between degree and costs of marginalization that wish to be targeted; the difficulty to promote a capability to associate; and how the subsidiarity principle may clash against the need to overcome marginalizing processes.

The Extended Social Grid Model Revisited

This chapter revisits the Extended Social Grid Model based on empirical work exploring the model. It summarizes the main findings around four basic points: first, the need to move beyond economic space as markets if social innovation for the marginalized is to be analysed in its full complexity and the variety of provision appreciated beyond a reductive focus on business. Second, the importance of a reflexive use of power in recognition of the reproduction of marginalization (as well as the multi-level opportunities that emerge once this move is made). Third, the role of considering beneficiaries in social innovation not only as participants but also as patients, and hence the need to consider the role of (justified) paternalism in social innovation. Fourth, a note of caution regarding systemic structural change and in favour of the value of niches.