Exploring a Holistic, Dynamic Framework for Agents-Driven Social Innovation

Exploring a Holistic, Dynamic Framework for Agents-Driven Social Innovation Abstract:   The conceptions of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship are largely embedded in local contexts, indicating their variation.... [ view full abstract ]

Exploring a Holistic, Dynamic Framework for Agents-Driven Social Innovation

Abstract:

  The conceptions of social enterprise and social entrepreneurship are largely embedded in local contexts, indicating their variation. Social innovation is viewed as non-uniform by researchers, practitioners, funders, and policymakers, and its research has mostly been ‘discipline-centric’. This paper takes an ‘issue-centric’ view of social innovation as a socioeconomic phenomenon that emerges as people act as change agents, using broadly-defined social enterprise as a vehicle and executing sustainable plural economies as an integral part of solving social problems, to co-create social value and change society for the better. It draws on the larger multi-dimensional combined research of: empirical cases; multi-disciplinary literature; and classical economic thought. These studies with abductive inference led to a construction of a holistic, dynamic framework with multi-level spatial linkages, that organizes descriptive and prescriptive inquires into the generative processes of social innovation, and which is accessible and useful to practitioners. Addressing its local, agents-driven nature, the framework builds on a circular meta-framework that comprises key, mutually reinforcing activities and required capabilities in clusters to serve its underpinning functional causes based on practical reasoning, of motivations, ends, means, and actions, respectively. Interlinked with this local level ‘container’ cultivating social innovation, is a ‘nested set of containers’ model to account for its ‘organic’ and ‘leveraged’ development at the regional, national level, and beyond.