Social innovation and entrepreneurs in the Norwegian context, on the outskirts of a European discourse

Social innovation and entrepreneurs in the Norwegian context, on the outskirts of a European discourse. A lot of what has been published about social innovation and social entrepreneurship has been written in an English,... [ view full abstract ]

Social innovation and entrepreneurs in the Norwegian context, on the outskirts of a European discourse.

A lot of what has been published about social innovation and social entrepreneurship has been written in an English, American or at least, a Central European context. Out of six project reports published from Norwegian research during the last five years, none are published or translated into English. The international academic community may therefore be somewhat ignorant about Norwegian policy, praxis and knowledge about social innovation and entrepreneurship.

This article show that many initiatives and social innovations taking place in Norway, happen beneath what we call the innovation radar. The initiatives attract little attention, and social initiators tend not to know what global trend they may be part of. There are an absence of terminology from the social enterprise discourse, and persons working as social entrepreneurs do not use that concept when describing their work. We will illuminate this core topic by referring to three research projects; one social housing project, one case study of five Norwegian municipalities, and a research project on barriers and incentives of social innovation in Norway.

Several methods was used to sample data in the three projects. The Housing First study was a division into sub-studies: A registration of social-, health- and abuse-related conditions among the participants over time, qualitative in-depth interviews with the participants, focus group interviews with both “clients” and “helpers”, and interviews with supporting team-members and collaborative partners in the supportive ecosystem around the project.

In the case study of the five municipalities data was collected within a mixed method research design; including interviews with open questionnaire, a broad survey distributed to all participants, meeting with representatives from each case in a workshop, and local focus interviews.

In the third study, we used focus group interviews with multiple participants, e-mail survey and prepared a register-data analysis on an accumulated dataset containing available data from all Norwegian public registers concerning local, regional and governmental founding of social enterprises.  

In all three projects, there are findings that point in the opposite direction of what seems to be the case in many other countries, where initiatives tend to have social enterprise-labels attributed as strategic political tools. Our findings point to a situation where social innovation and social entrepreneurship unfolds in part without such labels. There seems to be a mismatch in Norway, between the actual social activity and the pronounced awareness and knowledge of the vital innovation discourse in many European countries, regarding social innovation and entrepreneurship.

Our hypothesis is that the actual discourse may grow rapidly in Norway in years to come, but we do think it will appear more often within academia and the political establishment than among practitioners, public planners, bureaucrats and social workers. More mature insights about social innovation will probably strengthen the ability for Norwegian local politicians and public servants to plan, act out, and produce a higher degree of such innovation – for the benefit of those of us who will be in need of new ideas and new solutions in a pressured welfare state in the near future. It is important that social innovation actually happen - that it is not only talked about. In our view, however, we argue that  those two elements are interconnected. We observe that the discourse is about to find its way into Norwegian political programs, seminars, reports and research papers. For the time being, more and more people, also among practitioners, are starting to mention this rather new phenomenon in the Norwegian welfare system in terms of what they observe in other European countries, although the growing conditions in the Norwegian welfare state are somewhat different.