November 2024
Free access to open source digital book on Social Innovation
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This book is relevant to communities interested in sustainability, responsible leadership or social change, since it centres on the question of how diverse actors succeed in making the world a better place by means of innovation. It is based on a rigorous research program and integrates 3 years of research funded by the European Commission.
By uncovering how actors need to work together and which strategies they need to apply in generating positive impact, the book produces knowledge to inform policies and practices. It deals with the transformation of professional service delivery, the blurring boundaries between “private” and “public” actors and goods, and the ambition across sectors of increasing societal value.
The author team has won the "Best Book 2019 Award" of the Academy of Management's (AOM) Public and Nonprofit Division.
" We won an important award shortly after publishing the book and been pleased to read in the award message that: Social Innovation: Comparative Perspectives covers an important and relevant topic. It clearly outlines methodological approaches for analyzing social innovation, with sufficient detail that other studies could replicate. The book has practical value because it provides guidance to practitioners regarding how they can achieve social innovation in their contexts.” says Dr Gorgi Krlev, who works at the Centre for Social Investment (CSI) of the University of Heidelberg and co-author of the book.
Since it is hard to establish causality and to measure social properties when investigating impact, especially at the level of society, the book narrows down impact to one priority aspect: social innovation – understood as organizations’ capacity to generate novel ideas, ways and means of doing things, of addressing public and social problems of many kinds. Social innovation spans individual actors, organizations, and transformations in society in view of today’s grand challenges.
This volume is based on contributions of the project "ITSSOIN – Impact of the Third Sector as Social Innovation" funded by the European Commission under the 7th framework programme and authored by Prof Helmut K. Anheier, Dr Georg Mildenberger andDr Gorgi Krlev from the Centre for Social Investment at the University of Heidelberg.
The book is available online for free to read and download.
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