ABSTRACT

Social innovations addressing social, economic and environmental challenges are increasingly recognized as crucial drivers of social changes and today represent an important target for innovation and related policies on national and international levels, including the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). However, the concept of social innovation remains vague. This paper builds a conceptual framework from an economic perspective: The main criterion for identifying a social innovation concerns the way the benefits generated by an innovation are distributed between the (private or public) innovator and society. We close the paper by an extensive discussion of the conceptual boundaries, the research agenda and the policy implications we can derive based on the framework.

摘要

应对社会，经济和环境挑战的社会创新日益被认为是社会变革的关键驱动力，今天已成为国家和国际层面上创新和相关政策（包括联合国可持续发展目标（SDG））的重要目标。但是，社会创新的概念仍然模糊。本文从经济学的角度构建了一个概念框架：识别社会创新的主要标准涉及创新产生的收益在（私有或公共）创新者与社会之间的分配方式。我们通过对概念边界，研究议程以及基于该框架可以得出的政策含义的广泛讨论来结束本文。