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The significance of social innovations for successfully meeting social, economic, political and environmental challenges of the twenty-first century is recognized not only by stakeholders on the local, regional and even national level but also within the Europe 2020 strategy and on a global scale. However, despite this growing awareness, for a long time a sustained and systematic analysis of social innovation, its theories, characteristics and impacts was missing. In this setup, the paper seeks to contribute to a common theoretical ground in social innovation theory by elaborating on a comprehensive concept of social innovation grounded in social theory and discusses consequences for social innovations in the urban context. The paper starts with an outline of theoretical foundations of social innovation and investigates the relationship between social innovation and social change. It then discusses the consequences of a comprehensive concept of social innovation for the local level, highlighting its multi-sectoral perspective. Social innovation ecosystems are introduced as an emerging theoretical approach and heuristic model especially for urban social innovation. Here, results of a global mapping conducted by the international research project SI-DRIVE provide empirical insights into the diversity and current state of social innovation initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on social innovation in Latin America for social problems and societal challenges such as health care's low quality, education and poverty and mentions active participation of the beneficiary community; and activities in Corporate Social Responsibility.

Purpose: Against the backdrop of clear paradoxes and confusion in prevailing innovation policies, the contours of a new innovation paradigm, as elaborated in this paper, are becoming visible and causing social innovation to grow in importance. Originality/gap/relevance/implications: However, innovation research is still lacking sustained and systematic analysis of social innovation, its theories, characteristics, and impacts. The purpose of this paper is to focus on a theoretically sound concept of social innovation as a precondition for an integrated theory of socio-technological innovation in which social innovation is more than an appendage of technological innovation. Key methodological aspects: The paper presents first empirical results of the global research project "SI-DRIVE: Social Innovation - Driving Force of Social Change" and introduces key findings of a global mapping of social innovation initiatives. This quantitative mapping is based upon 1.005 social innovation initiatives. Summary of key results: The mapping underlines the broad range of actors involved in the mapped initiatives and thereby confirms the need for a crosssectoral concept of social innovation. It reveals a high diversity of social needs and societal challenges addressed by the initiatives as well as a high dependency on networks. The results also show that 90% of the initiatives are scaling. Key considerations/conclusions: Finally, on the basis of these empirical results, a recourse to Gabriel Tarde's social theory allows us to widen a perspective which was narrowed to economic and technological innovations by Schumpeter and after him by the sociology of technology, and to include social innovations in all their diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]