Research focus

Our research is focused on building and sharing knowledge about the most deep-rooted global social problems, in particular poverty, widening health inequalities, and environmental sustainability.

We believe that ‘solutions’ to these problems reside across sectors and organisational forms, and in a different kind of leadership that blurs the boundaries between what is for-profit and what is not-for-profit.

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Within the Cambridge Centre for Social Innovation, this involves working closely with organisations engaged in social change in order to help them interpret their experiences and to put them in a wider context so that ideas and practices can be shared with, and elaborated upon by, others addressing related issues and problems.

As well as helping social innovators to reflect upon and share effective ideas and practices, deep engagement helps academic researchers to develop research questions that are relevant to social innovators, to design research projects that better capture the organisational and leadership dynamics of social innovation, and ultimately to generate more nuanced and impactful theories of social change.

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