The activities that constitute the phases of the social innovation process: A study in the context of social impact businesses.
| Autor | Bezerra-de-Sousa, Indira Gandhi |
1 Introduction
Social innovation has been gaining prominence in academic discussions in the field of business and management since the early 2000s (Eichler & Schwarz, 2019; Van der Have & Rubalcaba, 2016), and it has been among the most debated topics in the area of innovation in recent years (Dionisio & Vargas, 2020). This relevance stems from the intention of social innovation to address complex social problems, such as social inequality, unemployment, and difficult access to healthcare and education, seeking to provide better social and environmental conditions for everyone (D'Amario & Comini, 2020; Lee, Spanjol, & Sun, 2019; Pol & Ville, 2009).
Social innovation is defined and understood from different perspectives. This study is based on the perspective that understands social innovation as a result, as it is composed of "innovative activities and services that are motivated by the goal of meeting a social need and that are predominantly diffused through organizations whose main objectives are social" (Mulgan, 2006, p. 146). Thus, social innovation can be generated from the actions of governments, third sector organizations, private companies, and social impact businesses, among others (Groot & Dankbaar, 2014).
Specifically, social impact businesses, as organizations capable of generating social innovations, are considered to be agents located between the private and philanthropic sectors that have an established social and/or environmental mission, value their social and/or environmental impact, and are financially sustainable by generating revenue (Pessanha, 2014; Barki, 2015; Petrini, Scherer, & Back, 2016). The term social impact businesses, used mainly in Brazil, may be substituted by other nomenclatures, such as social businesses and social enterprises, depending on the geographic context in which these organizations are located.
The way in which social impact businesses are organized to generate social innovations is still being discussed in the literature. Included among the various perspectives and approaches studied is the process by which social innovation is developed over time. The literature in the area has highlighted that social innovation occurs through a complex process (Cloutier, 2003; Westley & Antadze, 2010), as it involves the participation of different actors (Kolk & Lenfant, 2015; Phillips, Lee, Ghobadian, O'Regan, & James, 2015; Saji & Ellingstad, 2016) and seeks to achieve ambitious goals, which have not yet been reached in the social and environmental spheres.
Several proposals regarding the phases that make up the social innovation process have already been presented in the Brazilian literature (Correia-Lima, Costa, Cabral, Silva-Filho & Santos, 2013; Silva, Takahashi & Segatto, 2016; Silva & Segatto, 2020) and abroad (Belayutham, Ibrahim, Zulkifli, & Ibrahim, 2019; Benneworth & Cunha, 2015; Bhatt & Altinay, 2013; Herrera, 2015; Joao-Roland & Granados, 2020; Mulgan, Tucker, Ali & Sanders, 2007; Murray, Caulier-Grice, & Mulgan, 2010; Oeij et al., 2019; Vezina, Ben Selma, & Malo, 2019). However, the national and international studies have focused on the general phases of the process, and not on their details, which reveals the need for further research.
This need is also pointed out by Belayutham et al. (2019), Vezina, Ben Selma, and Malo (2019), and Foroudi, Akarsu, Marvi, and Balakrishnan (2020), who all argue that new studies are needed that explore the social innovation process. For Carl (2020), further research on this topic is important due to the organizational complexity inherent to goals as ambitious as those pursued by social innovation initiatives.
Considering the theoretical gap presented, this article seeks to answer the following question: how are activities structured in the phases of the social innovation development process in the context of social impact businesses? For this, a qualitative case study was developed of nine social impact businesses that generate social innovation in the Brazilian context.
This study intends to contribute in a number of ways to the field of social innovation. First, in presenting the activities that make up the phases of the social innovation process, attention is drawn to the need for a more specific analytical perspective at the activity level, since the phases of the process have already received greater dedication from researchers from a broader perspective. In addition, although a pre-existing phase model from the literature has been used (Bhatt & Altinay, 2013), this study suggests the inclusion of an unprecedented phase in that model, in addition to detailing the activities that comprise it, thus contributing to the advancement of knowledge in the field.
As for the practical context, this article seeks to provide contributions, based on the schematization of activities that constitute the phases of the social innovation process, for entrepreneurs and their teams involved in businesses with social impact. This can be useful for the management and planning of the activities of start-up ventures, as well as in helping entrepreneurs seeking to scale up their proposals.
2 Literature Review
The theoretical assumptions that support the concepts used in this research--social innovation, social impact businesses, and social innovation process--are explored in the following subsections.
2.1 Social innovation and social impact businesses
Social innovation arose, in part, from the insufficiency of traditional innovation in serving society as a whole (Dawson & Daniel, 2010). While any innovation can have a positive social impact and meet social needs, not all can be considered social innovations. For Cuntz, Foray, and Mostovova (2020), the term "social," when linked to innovation, is related to the need to share with society the value generated, which does not always occur with traditional innovation, in which most of the value created is captured by the private innovative agent.
In the field of applied social sciences, there are two main lines of understanding regarding the definition of social innovation, namely: one that understands social innovation as a participatory process, in which actors are part of the construction of initiatives (Cajaiba-Santana, 2014; Dawson & Daniel, 2010); and another that understands social innovation as a result, in which social value can be generated by an external organization and then its benefits are shared with society (Lettice & Parekh, 2010; Mulgan, 2006). This study follows the second viewpoint (the result perspective) and adopts the concept of social innovation suggested by Mulgan (2006, p. 146), who presents it as "innovative activities and services that are determined by the goal of meeting a social need and that are disseminated through companies whose main objectives are social."
As for the means by which social innovation is developed, the literature has highlighted hybrid organizations. These organizations are an important component for the development of new products and/or services that meet social needs in an innovative way (Cavazos-Arroyo, Puente-Diaz, & Agarwal, 2017; Mongelli, Rullani, Ramus, & Rimac, 2019; Mulgan, 2006) by combining social goals with financial sustainability (Di Domenico, Haugh, & Tracey, 2010). The nomenclature for these organizational forms depends on the context they form part of, and mainly vary between social enterprises, social businesses, businesses focused on the base of the pyramid, and inclusive businesses (Comini, Barki, & Aguiar, 2012).
In the Brazilian context, these organizations can also be called social impact businesses, a term adopted in this study. These are organizations that sell products and services that meet the social needs of the low-income population and, thus, obtain a financial return concurrently with the social return (Barki, 2015; Petrini et al., 2016). In this way, according to McQuilten, Warr, Humphery, and Spiers (2020), hybrid organizational forms have come to engage in a new way of solving social problems, which were previously basically addressed by governments and third sector organizations.
2.2 Social innovation development process
Social innovation emerges in the field of innovation (Chalmers & Balan-Vnuk, 2013), which makes it relevant to include a brief discussion on innovation processes in their conventional form. The conventional innovation process has been researched since Gruber and Marquis (1969) initially explored it with a focus on technological innovation. Thus, this field has a long history of discussions that have resulted in the construction of different models such as the linear and funnel ones, focusing on strategy and organization and on the interaction between organizational elements (Bagno, Salerno, & Silva, 2017).
The study by Utterback (1971) developed one of the first models based on the linear perspective, dividing the innovation process into four phases: i) generation of ideas; ii) invention; iii) implementation; and iv) dissemination. Since then, many other models have been presented using different approaches and considerations, such as the ones from Cooper (1993), Thomas (1993), and Kumar, Persaud, and Kumar (1996). In short, they are models of processes that group the construction of innovation into phases and, although they are presented in a serial way, in practice they reflect a sequence that can be repeated at various times throughout the process (Van de Ven, 2017).
Some literature reviews have tried to synthesize the conclusions of different studies that explore the process by which innovations are developed and implemented. Garud, Tuertscher, and Van de Ven (2013) consider that the literature has approached the innovation process as being composed of the phases of invention, development, and implementation. For Bagno, Salerno, and Silva (2017), these processes begin with ideation, followed by the operationalization of the proposal, and finish with the launch and expansion of...
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