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This essay embraces a notion of critical scholarship concerned with proposing normative and actionable alternatives that can create more inclusive societies and focuses on the role of institutionalizing experimental places for inclusive social innovation as a bottom-up strategic response to welfare state reforms. By mobilizing the notions of utopias and heterotopias in Foucault, the paper sheds light on the opportunity to move from policy utopias to democratic heterotopias, discussing the politics embedded in this cognitive shift and the democratic nature of social innovation changing social and governance relations by interacting with politico-administrative systems. Some obstacles to institutionalizing social innovation are highlighted, as well as some key governance mechanisms that can be activated either by public and/or social purpose organizations to try to overcome those obstacles. Finally, we discuss the importance of linking inclusive social innovation with democratic, rather than market logics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the last several decades, the concept of social innovation has been a subject of scientific and practical discourse. As an important paradigm for innovation policies, social innovation is also an object of criticism and debate. Despite a significant proliferation of literature, the rate at which social innovation is a catalyst for coping with challenges of modern societies remains unclear. The goal of the paper is to gain a better understanding of social innovation by integrating past and present views on the concept. Applying a historical overview covering the period from the 19th to the 21st century, we outline the milestones in the evolution of social innovation and distinguish seven trajectories that illustrate the commonalities in its interpretation. We consolidate the findings into a three-dimensional model that defines social innovation as an intervention that is targeted toward structural changes within a social dimension that, in terms of different functional settings (e.g., technological, business, organizational), are oriented on systemic improvements of societies. Reflecting on future avenues, we consider social innovation as an integrative part of a holistic intervention that acts across single societal dimensions and provides systemic impact for the sustainable development of societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to analyse the structure of social network co-occurrence and co-authorship of scientific documents of social innovation which are indexed in Scopus database. By using scientometric and network analysis techniques, the records were retrieved and integrated. It has been used a combination of software packages, including VOSviewer, Gephi, HistCite, Publish or Perish and NodeXL, for data analysis and mapping. Analysing all keywords shows that the most important keywords, based on frequency distribution, are innovation, sustainable growth and social entrepreneurship. Thematic mapping of the keywords using co-words analysis technique indicates that the topics innovation, social services and social change had top ranking in degree centrality, closeness centrality and betweenness indicators. The analysis of the co-authorship network of the field demonstrated that it is disconnected and sparse. Moreover, the total number of citations was 8,350. Mapping the knowledge structure of social innovation papers extracted from Scopus database could help to represent and visualise the thematic structure of research in the field of Social Science and Knowledge Studies and identify more specific research focuses within this field. It should be noted that in this study, the importance of concepts such as innovation, sustainable development and social entrepreneurship has been confirmed by reviewing the literature on these issues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The study of social innovations requires the understanding of complex phenomena such as the change of the social structure at the level of society. Therefore, beginning in the 19th century and continuing into the 20th century, sociologists such as Gabriel Tarde, William Ogburn, Wolfgang Zapf, economists such as Joseph Schumpeter, philosophers such as Karl Popper or management specialists such as Peter Drucker have approached the concept of innovation differently by laying the foundations of currents of thought regarding the role of innovations in social change processes. This article attempts to clarify the distinction between social innovation and social change both by presenting the theoretical framework and by reviewing the literature on social innovations. The author writes a comprehensive presentation on social innovation dedicated to students, researchers unfamiliar with this topic and others interested in analyzing social innovations in certain fields of activity. Readers going through the article will identify the most recent efforts to strengthen social innovation as a distinct field of study by researchers who have distinguished themselves in the early 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]