New Frontiers in Social Innovation Research

This book is open access under a CC BY license.

Interest in social innovation continues to rise, from governments setting up social innovation 'labs' to large corporations developing social innovation strategies. Yet theory lags behind practice, and this hampers our ability to understand social innovation and make the most of its potential. This collection brings together work by leading social innovation researchers globally, exploring the practice and process of researching social innovation, its nature and effects. Combining theoretical papers and empirical studies, it shows how social innovation is blurring traditional boundaries between the market, the state and civil society, thereby developing new forms of services, relationships and collaborations. It takes a critical perspective, analyzing potential downsides of social innovation that often remain unexplored or are glossed over, yet concludes with a powerful vision of the potential for social innovation to transform society. It aims to be a valuable resource for students and researchers, as well as policy makers and others supporting and leading social innovation.

Alex Nicholls is Professor of Social Entrepreneurship at Said Business School, University of Oxford, United Kingdom. He has published numerous in a wide range of peer-reviewed journals and books. He was co-editor of Social Innovation: Blurring Boundaries to Reconfigure Markets (Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), the first major collection of papers on social innovation.

Julie Simon is Research Programme Lead at the Young Foundation, United Kingdom. She has written major reports on social innovation as part of TEPSIE, a European Commission project which explored the theoretical, empirical and policy foundations of social innovation in Europe. She co-authored the The Open Book of Social Innovation (2010).

Madeleine Gabriel is Principal Researcher at Nesta, United Kingdom, focusing on social and public innovation. Her research focuses on ways to support and grow social innovation. She is author of Making it Big: Strategies for Scaling Social Innovations and co-author of People Helping People; the Future of Public Services (both 2014).