Inside the Black box of the Social Innovation: Proposing a Theoretical-Explanatory Model on its Development Process and Suggestions for Future Research

Abstract

Social innovation has been considered as a response to the problems that afflict society, such as poverty, hunger, and challenges related to the limits of environmental resources. Although a considerable number of researches have been carried out, contributions are still needed to better understand what happens inside this “black box”, in reference to the term used by Rosenberg (1982), in order to clarify the process of social innovation. In this sense, this study aims to analyse the process of innovation and propose a theoretical-explanatory model. Therefore, a review of the contributions present in the literature on models used to explain the process of social innovation was developed. Once there was a lack of consensus, we suggested a theoretical-explanatory model as the main contribution of this study. The model proposed presents the social innovation process as being composed of seven phases: research, analysis and proposition of solutions, formalization and pilot design, maintenance, evaluation, scalability, systemic social change. In addition, this study draws attention to the collective way in which social innovation is developed, although the published models do not reveal such specificity. From the proposed procedural perspective, new research possibilities can be developed in an attempt to better understand the trajectory of social innovation projects through a more specific look.

Keywords

• inovação social
• problemas sociais
• processo
• modelo teórico-explicativo.