The Social Innovation Matchmaker: The Contested Interface Between ‘Beautiful Tech’ and Social Innovation in Government
8 May 2025
12:00 -13:30
Times are shown in local time.
Open to: All
Room W2.02 (Cambridge Judge Business School)
Trumpington St
Cambridge
CB2 1AG
United Kingdom
Join our Strategy and International Business seminar
Speaker: Professor Christine Beckman, University of California Santa Barbara
About the seminar topic
This study explores how reliance on digital technology from the private sector shapes what government actors come to see as legitimate social and environmental problems worth tackling. We conducted a detailed qualitative case study of a program we call InnovTech. The programme connected social and environmental problems outlined by government with digital technology from tech businesses, with the aim to foster social innovations.
In our findings, we detail how several interfaces between government and tech businesses shaped which problems became foregrounded and accepted, ultimately leading to the unforeseen consequences of narrowly constructing problems that seem solvable only through digital technology. Our insights contribute to understanding the tensions between business and governments in tackling social and environmental problems and recent debates about the dynamics of social innovation.
Speaker bio
Dr Christine Beckman is a Professor in the Technology Management Program at UC Santa Barbara. She is also the current Editor in Chief at Administrative Science Quarterly.
Professor Beckman has published over 20 articles in peer-reviewed journals and is known for her research on entrepreneurship, organisational learning, gender inequality, technology and innovation, and interorganisational networks. She has a 2020 ethnographic book, Dreams of the Overworked: Living, Working and Parenting in the Digital Age (with M. Mazmanian, Stanford University Press), and edited a 2021 Research in the Sociology of Organisations volume on the legacy of Jim March’s scholarship.
She was previously the Price Family Chair in Social Innovation and Professor at the USC Price School of Public Policy, with courtesy appointments at the Marshall School of Business and in the Department of Sociology. She has also served on the faculty at the Robert H. Smith School of Business, University of Maryland, and the Paul Merage School of Business, University of California, Irvine.
She is a native Californian and received her BA in Psychology, MA in Sociology, and PhD in Organisational Behavior from Stanford University. She is the current Sandra Dawson Visiting Professor at Cambridge Judge Business School.
Register
No registration required. If you have any questions about this seminar, please email Luke Slater.