Social innovation has broadly been defined as citizen-led initiatives aimed at improving community welfare through collaborative relationships. However, numerous studies demonstrate that social innovation might actually create new inequalities. In this paper, we address the following questions: how might socially innovative projects influence public policy? How can we understand a policy shift leading to institutions not only giving support to social innovation projects but even promoting their own social innovation schemes? Is institution-led social innovation different from citizen-led efforts? If so, how? We provide evidence of local public policy change occurring in 0–3 education and care in Barcelona between 2015 and 2021. We explain how this happened, examining who redefined the issue and how, how the policy domain was reorganized, and how the policy subsystem was restructured. Our conclusions show how and why citizens and institutions define social innovation differently and how innovative 0–3 policy in Barcelona was adopted.

Social investment can act as an empowering funding mechanism that could activate the economic agency of marginalised people while addressing their social needs. Nonetheless, political agendas might cause divergence in the achievement of social investment’s potential benefits. To develop our understanding in this area, this paper aims to extract discursive policy framings of social investment by comparing the UK and Scottish Government policies to identify the use of social investment and its implications on social innovation. Using corpus linguistic methods that allows for a framing analysis, the paper’s findings are twofold. Firstly, both the UK and Scottish Governments share similarities in the framing of social investment policy, especially in the proclivity towards the privatisation of social welfare delivery using market mechanisms. Secondly, the governments differ in their intensity of conviction for social investment which creates divergent implications for social innovation practice in the countries.

In Norway, the housing challenges faced by migrant workers highlight increasing inequality. Designers striving to create more equitable and sustainable futures must adopt system-oriented tools and human-centered approaches. Utilizing giga-mapping and narratives as prototypes helps reframe issues, enhance communication, and simplify complexity into actionable steps. However, successful outcomes demand refined application and careful attention to communication, necessitating significant investment of time, skills, and effort.

Students mental health is declining. StudyWell is a project aiming at positive impact on student mental health in student cities in Norway; by integrating relational welfare with service design, and the study environment as a starting point. We discussfour implementation challenges: First, co-design depends on a shared mindset across disciplinary boundaries. Secondly, balancing the lenses of individuals, community, system and future require facilitation. Thirdly, societal impact requires continuous partner anchoring. Finally, approaches must not further pathologize university student.

Introducing new technologies in low-income contexts have potential for positive social impact, and such efforts are made by humanitarian engineering non-govermental organisations (NGOs). The impact can increase if a systemic sustainability perspective is considered in the design process. Sustainability criteria are identified using a literature study combined with an empirical study together with a Swedish NGO. These criteria are synthesized into a simplified Sustainability Fingerprint tool which is evaluated and deemed to be useful when introducing new technologies in low-income contexts.

Post-industrial society is driving global environmental change, which is a challenge for all generations, current and future. The Anthropocene is the geological epoch in which humans dominate and it is rooted in the past, present, and future. Future sustainability is building on the momentum of the fundamental importance of studying human dynamics and governance of coupled social and ecological systems. In the Anthropocene, social innovation may play a critical role in achieving new pathways to sustainability. This conventional narrative review uses a qualitative analysis anchored in the Grounded Theory Method and a systematic collection and analysis of papers to identify broad types of social innovations. Scientific journal articles published since 2018 were prioritised for inclusion. The six types of social innovation proposed are (a) authentic engagement; (b) artful and engaging communication; (c) urging and compelling change; (d) governance for social-ecological systems; (e) anticipation in governance; and (f) lived experiences and values. The six innovations proposed in this paper can be embedded within, and form part of, social action using a science–society compact for the sustainable development of coasts in the Anthropocene.

There is a complex interaction between pollution, climate change, the environment and people. This complex interplay of actions and impacts is particularly relevant in coastal regions, where the land meets the sea. To achieve sustainable development in coastal systems, a better understanding is necessary of the role and impact of pollution and the connectedness of the elements, namely, pollution, climate and the people, as well as associated impacts unfolding in an integrated social–ecological system (SES). In this context, the enabling capacity of tools connecting scientific efforts to societal demands is much debated. This paper establishes the basis for climate-smart socially innovative tools and approaches for marine pollution science. The goal of developing a set of innovative tools is twofold: first, to build on, integrate, and further improve the well-founded strengths in diagnosis and process understanding of systemic environmental problems; and, second, to provide decision-making with usable information to create actionable knowledge for managing the impact of marine pollution on the SES under a changing climate. The paper concludes by establishing the scope for a ‘last mile’ approach incorporating scientific evidence of pollution under climate change conditions into decision-making in a SES on the coast. The paper uses case studies to demonstrate the need for collaborative tools to connect the science of coastal pollution and climate with decision-making on managing human activities in a SES.

Academic discussion of social challenges and the government interventions which might address them are overlooking social innovation as an option. Contemporary trends at the community-public management interface, however, show an upsurge of interest in social innovation as a way of simultaneously creating social benefit and economic opportunity. While this indicates that the idea has genuine substance our observation of international and Australian developments convinces us that there is now sufficient experience upon which to base an understanding of what social innovation is and why it has policy significance. In this article we identify some components of social innovation practice and indicate how these might be theorised into generally applicable models.

We explore how macro and micro networks influence the diffusion of technological innovation and cultural/social behavior. Across the historical regimes in China and Europe, dynastic lordship's macro networks afforded different advantages in technological innovation. A network particular to Europe, the Roman Church, extended deep into local parishes with ethical norms prescribing fairness to strangers, and these cultural foundations helped guilds, trade associations, merchant courts, and universities operate cooperatively far beyond kinship. In contrast, Chinese emperors relied on ancient Confucian moral codes and system-spanning Confucian-educated officialdom; but fiscal limitations compelled officials to defer to local lineage orders, resulting in an enduring cultural pattern of guanxi and a polity whose institutional problem-solving capacity falter beyond the local level. Yet the civil service system has enabled China to outperform similar lineage-dependent regimes. Probing network topologies, we find that system-spanning networks can facilitate technological diffusion, but local networks influence cultural and behavioral change.

Outcomes Based Commissioning (OBC) – for example, Pay for Success (in the US) or Payment by Results (in the UK) – has been suggested as a way to provide ‘more’ social services for ‘less’ public resources. Such commissioning is often linked with an innovative financing tool called a Social Impact Bond (SIB). Using data from the Social Finance UK Database and focusing on SIBs in the US and UK, we evaluate whether the SIB approach aligns with the theoretical predictions of social innovation. The results provide limited evidence that SIBs facilitate capital injections from the private sector into the production of social goods as well as facilitate parts of the process of social innovation – namely, piloting and scaling. We conclude that there is significant variation, both between the US and UK and within the US, in social innovation ecosystems and the role played by SIBs.

This article illustrates how the term “social innovation” is used in the public policy domain in Hong Kong in relation to the new public management (NPM) reform of the social service sector, which originated in the early 2000s. Through document reviews and interviews, the role that social innovation policy has played in instigating changes in the contemporary social service field in the post-NPM era is identified. This includes facilitating emergence of “new” forms of social entrepreneurial activities to fill unmet social needs, empowering new actors in entering the social service sector, and reinforcing the government’s position in the NPM reform. Adopting historical institutionalism as the analytical framework, multiple path-dependent characteristics arising from the historical legacies of the incumbent social service environment – such as the longstanding partnership between the state and non-profits – are highlighted. These historical factors have weakened the efficacy of the policy efforts aimed at enacting institutional change. Overall, this article demonstrates how historical context matters in the emergence and framing of social innovation policy. It contributes to the theorisation of the role of social innovation in social service sector development in East Asia.

We interviewed grassroots food innovators in South Africa to explore the diverse ways in which their narratives expressed different capacities for resilience, such as dealing with surprise and shaping desirable change. We drew on key resilience themes of rootedness, resourcefulness and resistance (the 3Rs) as lenses through which to view their personal stories and efforts to build resilience and reshape the future. We used narrative and interpretative methods to connect the personal and context-specific experiences of food innovators to the 3Rs, exploring a new approach to uncovering resilience capacities. We suggest that this approach could be usefully employed to understand potential resilience capacities that could help address diverse sustainability challenges around the world.

Product-service systems (PSSs) are regarded as one of the promising ways to contribute to a sustainable society. Despite the well-developed knowledge, PSS design lack of long-term perspective to treat related changes and uncertainties. To address this issue, this paper proposes a conceptual framework of sustainable PSS design for sustainability transition by integrating insight from design approach for system innovation and transition. Applicability of the proposed framework is illustrated through application to example of PSS development project for wildlife nuisance in a suburban city.