Social innovation as the pathway for sustainable development

Abstract

Currently the concept of social innovation is making its way into the international academic and political discourse since social innovations have a capacity to combine societal and environmental goals with an entrepreneurial spirit. Indeed, many socially conscious entrepreneurs have developed and applied in practice innovative and creative business models to address social and environmental problems previously overlooked by governmental, NGOs or business organizations. In this respect, social innovation is a promising tool and approach towards sustainable development needs and priorities. The objective of this paper is to analyze the concept of social innovation within the context of sustainable development discourse by synthetizing the established and emerging definitions of social innovation. The literature review indicates that social innovation may have many definitions since it is interrelated with many other concepts like social entrepreneurship, sustainability, social welfare, etc. In this line, this paper seeks to contribute to the current understanding of a social innovation and provide a comprehensive overview of the existing literature by synthesizing existing conceptual studies on social innovation and its co-related concepts.