Publication date: June 2017
Source:Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Volume 119

Author(s): Mónica Edwards-Schachter, Matthew L. Wallace

This paper examines the evolution in the conceptualization of Social Innovation (SI) with a view to elucidating the multiplication of uses of the term over the last half century. We performed a comprehensive and systematic literature review extracting 252 definitions of SI through a search of 2,339 documents comprising academic papers, books and book chapters, together research and policy reports. To guide the inductive analysis of pluri-vocal discourses we assume innovation to be a learning-based process involving actors’ interactions and social practices. We apply mixed qualitative methodologies, combining content analysis based on an interpretivist ontology with cognitive mapping techniques. Our findings show that SI was introduced as an analytical concept by incipient academic communities and has spread in the last decades as a normative concept fuelled by development and innovation policies. SI is defined by a set of common core elements underpinning three different and interrelated discursive ‘areas’: processes of social change, sustainable development and the services sector. We point to some policy implications and a number of promising avenues for research towards the advancement of a broader socio-technical theory of innovation.

Publication date: Available online 4 June 2017
Source:Technological Forecasting and Social Change

Author(s): Chun-Shuo Chen, Chih-Ching Yu, Jer-San Hu

Leading enterprises worldwide are proactively fulfilling environmental protection. This trend has elicited international attention. The corporate environmental responsibility (CER) framework was constructed based on the strategy these enterprises executed. This conceptual framework precisely determined current international advanced CER content. However, understanding the true intention of businesses that practice environmental management and protection through the CER framework is difficult, thereby making CER performance measurement indicators crucial. However, the lack of active CER performance measurement indicators resulted in the inability to reflect fully the effects of industry situation and business development on the living environment. Hence, this situation signals the urgency to construct CER performance measurement indicators that reflect fully industry situation and social needs. This study aims to address the deficiencies of CER performance measurement indicators in the academic circle, and construct a set of active CER performance measurement indicators that fully reflect the effects of industry situation and business development on the living environment. For this reason, this study employs content analysis method to establish CER performance measurement indicators based on the CER framework. This indicator provides an effective and applied CER performance measurement tool and offers the government with foresighted concepts of environmental protection.

Publication date: Available online 16 May 2017
Source:Long Range Planning

Author(s): Marion Ligonie

Using performativity as a theoretical angle, this paper explores how shared value, a strategic management concept, shaped a gambling company's strategy despite the inherent inconsistency between gambling, a socially harmful activity, and shared value, which is intended to create economic value by creating social value. The study introduces the notion of “forced performativity”, the process wherein a concept performs in a highly infelicitous context. It identifies three moments that were determinant in the forced performativity of shared value: the Porter author-isation, referring to the mobilisation of the author's persona to establish the legitimacy of the concept; the causality distortion, when causalities drawing explicit links between social and financial performance are created; and the incitement of friction, wherein the purposeful maintaining of tensions ensured the stabilisation of the socio-technical assemblage. These three moments are connected within a process model of forced performativity. The paper contributes to the ongoing debate about how recent sociological ramifications of performativity relate to its linguistic origin by arguing for the complementarity of these two approaches. The intent is also to open a discussion about a performativity-based understanding of corporate social responsibility.

Innovation for environmental sustainability requires firms to engage with external stakeholders to access expertise, solve complex problems, and gain social legitimacy. In this open innovation context, stakeholder engagement is construed as a dynamic capability that can harness differences between external stakeholders to augment their respective resource bases. An integrative systematic review of evidence from 88 scientific articles finds that engaging stakeholders in environmental innovation requires three distinct levels of capability: specific operational capabilities; first-order dynamic capabilities to manage the engagement (engagement management capabilities); and second-order dynamic capabilities to make use of contrasting ways of seeing the world to reframe problems, combine competencies in new ways, and co-create innovative solutions (value framing), and to learn from stakeholder engagement activities (systematized learning). These findings enhance understanding of how firms can effectively incorporate stakeholder perspectives for environmental innovation, and provide an organizing framework for further research into open innovation and co-creation more broadly. Wider contributions to the dynamic capabilities literature are to (i) offer a departure point for further research into the relationship between first-order and second-order dynamic capabilities, (ii) suggest that institutional theory can help explain the dynamic capability of value framing, (iii) build on evidence that inter-institutional learning is contingent on not only the similarity but also the differences between organizational value frames, and (iv) suggest that operating capabilities impact the effectiveness of dynamic capabilities, rather than only the other way around, as is usually assumed. A methodological contribution is made through the application of quality assessment criteria scores and intercoder reliability statistics to the selection of articles included in the systematic review.