Social innovation in rural development: identifying the key factors of success

In political and lay discourses, social innovation has recently been seen as a promising solution to fill gaps caused by austerity politics, or as a means to meet the so‐called Grand Challenges of the twenty‐first century. This article focuses on factors supporting the success of social innovation; that is, factors that support the development of a social innovation that enhances the probability of a high rate of adoption. To achieve this, the questions addressed are: Which factors bring forward social innovation? Where in the innovation process do they take effect? To what extent can rural development policy purposefully exert influence on these factors? Drawing on findings in innovation and social innovation research as well as from the rural participative planning discourse, it is shown that three tiers of factors influence the success of social innovation. These are: (1) factors important for the success of the overall innovation process; (2) factors influencing the room to manoeuvre for the social innovation actor network; and (3) factors influencing the actual participation process. A closer look at each of these factors reveals that most of them are excluded from external steering, and only factors influencing the room to manoeuvre provide potential links for rural policy to support social innovation. This allows one to conclude that social innovation in rural development cannot be easily initiated or steered from the top down, raising the question of whether social innovation can be politically instrumentalised.