A new framework for social innovation

When the city of Vancouver established Canada’s first safe drug injection site back in 2004, it sparked a spirited discussion about the use and misuse of social innovation. While many viewed deaths from the injection of impure drugs as a self-evident problem, some local citizens viewed the use of illegal drugs as so immoral that it should not be made safer. Others worried that these drug-injection facilities would promote drug use and pose dangers to the community, and efforts should be focused on fighting illegal drug use rather than facilitating it. 

Even the tackling of less contentious social issues, like homelessness, can face scepticism from people concerned about fostering dependency while sparking concerns that efforts to combat homelessness address the symptom rather than the root causes of the problem. 

So how can social innovators find better ways to convince stakeholders of their practices (and not only their missions), in order to make better and faster progress in tackling society’s many issues?

How persuasive practices can boost the effectiveness and impact of social innovation 

Research at Cambridge Judge Business School by Paul Tracey, Professor of Innovation and Organisation, and Neil Stott, Management Practice Professor of Social Innovation, points to a novel way of framing the work of social innovators that draws on what they term a ‘repertoire of persuasive practices’ that simultaneously focus on both the problem and solution of the issue at hand. 

“Too often the problem and solution have not been sufficiently interlinked to make social innovation as effective as it can be,” says Paul. “Our aim is to provide a model that is as effective in practice as in theory.” 

The goal of the framework of Paul and Neil is to show the importance of legitimising a particular understanding of an issue so that it is widely viewed as a problem in society that needs to be addressed, while at the same time establishing a particular approach to tackling that issue so the chosen method is broadly accepted as an effective solution.  

Why is this work important? Because addressing a social issue requires more than developing an effective approach to the problem at hand. Social innovators also need to persuade key stakeholders that their approach is effective – and that these stakeholders should support and commit resources to it – particularly as there will be many alternative ways that the problem could be addressed.  

This idea can help social innovators increase the visibility, impact and acceptance of their work, and Paul and Neil believe that it holds real promise in helping to address some of the world’s wicked problems. These include nearly a billion people living in extreme poverty, 800 million lacking access to electricity, more than 2 billion people who lack safe drinking water and 89 million people who have been forcibly displaced – all exacerbated by persistent inequality and the effects of climate change.

Expanding the scope of social innovation beyond market-driven models 

The research by Paul and Neil, Co-Directors of the Cambridge Centre for Social Innovation at Cambridge Judge, draws on – and adds important elements to – previous studies about so-called ‘social-symbolic work’,  which is broadly defined as the purposeful efforts of individuals, groups and networks of people to construct the social and organisational worlds. 

Such discussion of social innovation has usually been underpinned by an assumption that social change requires organisations to practice market-based activity while balancing social and commercial goals. But this approach “has come to be perceived narrowly and in ways that arguably distort both how it is theorised and how it is enacted in practice”, argues research by Paul and Neil in the Journal of Management Studies, because it often makes such activity increasingly dependent on the ability to convince foundations, governments and investors that engrained social issues can only be addressed through enterprise done at scale. 

“As a result of this dominant way of viewing social problems and their solutions, social innovators often default to market-based, entrepreneurial practices no matter the context or the issue,” says the research. “By contrast, we conceptualise social innovation as fundamentally rooted in social-symbolic processes where social problems and solutions serve as foundational, and mutually constituted, social-symbolic objects that guide the actions of social innovators. This perspective offers an alternative to much existing social innovation research, which emphasises, for example, the mobilisation of resources, the fostering of partnerships and alliances and the creation of models that balance social and commercial goals.”

Creating new organisational models with hybrid logic in social innovation 

Prior Cambridge Judge research, for example, focused on how a social enterprise effectively framed homelessness as a problem of unemployment rather than of housing – and this helped cement support from key stakeholders including investors, policymakers and other homeless support groups.  

“The question of how new organisational forms are created remains an unsolved problem in new institutional theory,” says this earlier research, published in the journal Organization Science. “We argue that one important way that new organisational forms emerge is through a process of bridging institutional entrepreneurship, which involves an institutional entrepreneur combining aspects of established institutional logics to create a new type of organisation underpinned by a new, hybrid logic.” 

Homelessness was also the focus of research by Simon Dwight, a graduate of the Masters of Studies in Social Innovation degree programme (MSt in Social Innovation 2020) at Cambridge Judge. The research, which explored how homeless people in the UK city of Bedford make sense of interventions designed to help them, was supervised by Professor Paul Tracey as part of the degree programme. 

“Those able to build relationships outside the homeless community were better able to succeed in moving out of homelessness,” the research found, according to a summary published on the Cambridge Judge website. In addition, the research found that newly homeless people often lack information about interventions designed to help them, with such information often being mediated “for better or worse” by other members of the homeless community who had previously experienced interventions. 

“Ending homelessness is about more than finding buildings for people to live in. It is about helping those that have fallen out of mainstream society back into it and finding a place to belong,” says the research, which notes that its findings may also apply to other marginalised communities such as refugees and asylum seekers.

A practical framework that bridges theory and practice in social innovation 

The research at Cambridge Judge concludes that such social-symbolic work is a “particularly valuable lens for examining social innovation because of its ability to span theory and practice” – bridging various domains that too often operate in silos. 

“A key strength of our framework is that it highlights a more expansive repertoire of practices that social innovators need to enact when seeking to make change,” say Paul and Neil. “We hope that social innovation researchers and practitioners will challenge, test and extend our framework, and in so doing help to promote a set of ideas that social innovators can use in their social-symbolic efforts to make lasting social change.”