Innovations in Doing and Being: Capability Innovations at the Intersection of Schumpeterian Political Economy and Human Development

This paper seeks to contribute to a conceptual perspective with which to approach the evaluations and explanation of social entrepreneurs as agents of social change. First, it discusses the capability approach as a comprehensive normative framework with which to articulate ‘the social’ in a way that deals with the triple challenge of specifying ‘the social’ in a context of conflicts of interests, value diversity and exclusive public spheres. Second, the paper proposes two explanatory hypotheses of innovation for social change: (a) social innovation as the carrying out of new combinations of capabilities; (b) social entrepreneurs as characterized by their capacity to imagine and carry out new combinations of capabilities. The combination of capabilities suggests a subset of human development where ethics meets innovation: a capability innovation pathway at the crossroads of long-term, societal perspectives on change (human development, Schumpeterian economic development) where innovation is social and capability advancement entrepreneurial.