VALUE SPHERES IN SOCIAL INNOVATION

Previous theories of innovation and entrepreneurship tend mostly to focus on science, technology and economic value as the fundamental drivers and outcomes of innovation (Sitglitz, 2010; Chesbrough, 2008; Steyart & Hjorth,... [ view full abstract ]

Previous theories of innovation and entrepreneurship tend mostly to focus on science, technology and economic value as the fundamental drivers and outcomes of innovation (Sitglitz, 2010; Chesbrough, 2008; Steyart & Hjorth, 2006). There is, however, clearly a need for broadening and differentiating the conceptions of drivers and outcomes of innovation to understand more fully the whole value-generating process in social innovation as well as social entrepreneurship and social enterprise. Furthermore, economic value tends to take a prominent place in current discussions of innovation. We need to broaden the conception of value in order to better understand how innovation processes are constitutive of varied outcomes and what the roles of values more generally are for stabilizing innovation through everyday as well as critical and normative work.

Concepts of social value are crucial to social enterprise and social entrepreneurship research (Nicholls, 2008; Defourny, Hulgård & Pestoff, 2014). In a Schumpeterian perspective on innovation, the economic impact factor is a crucial element in entrepreneurship and innovation and thus distinguishes commercial innovation from both social and public innovation and entrepreneurship. If social innovation and public sector innovation should be understood as something that have social impact or create public value we need to further specify how to define this. This is a precondition if we wish to discuss, assess and compare this value creation or social impact in different empirical cases. A specification of the different types of value at stake in different types of innovation may also feed into the discussions about how to distinguish between public, private, and social innovation.

The paper contributes to such a systematic development of concepts of value and a discussion of how different value spheres may contribute to our understanding of social innovation and entrepreneurship as something distinct from commercial and perhaps also public innovation. In order to dig into the differences between public, private and social values in relation to innovation, we draw on theories of different spheres of society, including distinctions between the public, the private and the social. More specifically, drawing on Max Weber's concept of value spheres and his cultural analysis of societal development as presented in his sociology of religion the paper develops an understanding of four value spheres that are important to social entrepreneurs: economic value, public value, social value and consumer value. Understanding these value spheres is important for more nuanced future research on social enterprise and social entrepreneurship. The paper discusses how these value spheres may be seen as both contradictory and complementary in concrete cases of social entrepreneurship and social innovation.

The paper concludes that innovation studies should be able to capture how innovation processes often constitutes an outcome in its own right (Moulaert, MacCallum, Mehmood and Hamdouch, 2013). We argue that particularly in social innovation studies the outcome should be kept more open instead of focusing mostly on either the end result or the economic value and the economic impact factor in a narrow sense. Focusing economic value in a narrow sense would leave out the many societal processes, normative foundations, critical concerns that appear important for stabilizing innovative activities and finding appropriate solutions to social innovation.