Different Cultures, Different Dynamics? Driving Forward a Community Perspective of Social Innovation

Tackling society’s grand challenges is an increasingly important topic that many organizational scholars have started to turn towards. In this context, one question that has lately garnered a lot of attention is how social innovation, can help to tackle such issues. While much of the prior literature on social innovation has focused on heroic social entrepreneurs engaged in “changing the world” or hybrid organizations managing the ongoing tension between business and charity, we see a growing interest in the role of environmental contexts in shaping the emergence, diffusion, and implications of social innovation endeavors. In response to this burgeoning interest, in this panel symposium, our aim is to drive forward a community perspective which may help to develop a more contextualized and nuanced understanding of social innovation across the globe.