Social Innovation in an Interconnected World: Introduction to the Special Issue

This introduction provides an overview of the special issue and identifies the need for continued work in the area of social innovation, which seeks to create social value and progress and engages multiple stakeholders. Our special issue highlights various levels and stakeholders involved in the process and outcomes of social innovation. While mainstream innovation, which has been traditionally driven by profit maximization motivations, tends to create winners and losers, social innovation that focuses on redistribution of knowledge, discovery, and cocreation changes the key assumptions and logics of the conventional innovation theory. This introduction first briefly outlines current social innovation literature, presents the contributions created in this special issue, and concludes with the identification of three priorities (or needs) for social innovation researchers.