Social innovation: An exploration of the barriers faced by innovating organizations in the social economy

Dominic Chalmers

Local Economy, 2013, vol. 28, issue 1, 17-34

Abstract: Social and community-based organizations are increasingly viewed as wellsprings of valuable social innovations. Government policies, most notably David Cameron’s Big Society initiative, have entrenched the concept of localism across the UK, and the move towards smaller government has placed the onus on communities to creatively tackle their own problems. While antecedent research on social innovation has largely concentrated on success stories, few have stopped to consider the profound nature of this shift and the operational obstacles it may pose for small resource-constrained organizations. This article seeks to contribute to current debates on social innovation by critically reviewing extant literature and proposing a model of ‘open’ social innovation. Furthermore, it serves as a tool to stimulate further discussion around the ‘opening up’ of the social innovation process and raises some timely questions about the efficacy of localism policy measures.

Keywords: Big Society; localism; open innovation; social enterprise; social entrepreneurship; social innovation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (4)

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0269094212463677 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:loceco:v:28:y:2013:i:1:p:17-34

DOI: 10.1177/0269094212463677

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Local Economy from London South Bank University
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().