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Acting boldly without being limited by resources currently in hand, and
Exhibiting heightened accountability to the constituencies served and for the
outcomes created.
Both social innovation and social entrepreneurship are highly intertwined, since social
entrepreneurship emphasizes more the very approach and goal, whereas social innovation
emphasizes the result. Social entrepreneurship entails the ideological combination of
participation, social mission, and market methods to achieve social transformation (Chell,
2007). Social innovation is explicitly oriented to provide results for the social and
environmental good. It is innovation inspired by the desire to meet social needs which can
be neglected by traditional forms of private market provision and which have often been
poorly served or unresolved by services organised by the state (Harris and Albury, 2009).
These both the concepts of social innovation and social entrepreneurship are key towards
further advancing the theory of sustainable development.
Conclusions
This paper analyzed the concept of social innovation within the context of sustainable
development discourse by synthetizing the established and emerging definitions of social
innovation and social entrepreneurship. 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. From reviewing the many
definitions of social innovation, it is clear that the context in which they were created
matters to a great extent. For instance, both social innovation and social entrepreneurship
are highly intertwined, however, social entrepreneurship emphasizes more the very
approach and goal (based on the very logic of entrepreneurship), whereas social innovation
emphasizes the result (the creation of an innovative product or solution). This theoretical
review suggests that a discourse plays they key role in determining social innovation
definition, since it represents a perspective, a domain, a conceptual framework, and a way
of looking at things. Therefore, if a definition of social innovation is formulated within the
discourse of sustainable development theory, the sustainable development theory becomes
the defining aspect of the resulting definition.
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