Social innovation and the remaking of structures, systems and regimes

This chapter describes the ways in which social innovation is understood in the literatures on socio-ecological transformation, socio-technical transitions and socio-economic transformation which adopt a system perspective to innovation. According to those literatures system change is always linked up with changes in social organization and thus with social innovation. The aforementioned systemic approaches discussed place social innovation in the ‘bigger picture’ of broader shifts in the socio-institutional landscape and pay attention to the affordances of new technological configurations and of evolving eco-systems. The systemic approaches have thus much to offer to social innovation research, but they have their blind spots – notably with regard to the social dimension of the coupled social-technical-ecological-economic systems. They are quite disparate and developed in separate scientific communities, but recent scholarship on social innovation does offer cross-over analyses.