Finisterra - Revista Portuguesa de Geografia (Jun 2006)
Dimensões e espaços da inovação social
Abstract
DIMENSIONS AND SPACES OF SOCIAL INNOVATION. Following a period in which the idea of innovation was almost exclusively associated with the technological domain, the notion of social innovation has over the past few years gained increasing recognition and come to be used in a variety of contexts. In most of the of the market, usually without direct intervention by the State, and primarily aimed at social inclusion through the activity of the third sector. However, the conceptual discussion within the scope of Project LINKS has led us to further delimit the scope of the concept of social innovation, in order to define the conceptual framework of the research. Thus, we suggest that social innovation be regarded as consisting of any new response enjoying social recognition that both seeks and achieves social change while fulfilling three criteria: i) the satisfaction of human needs not met through market mechanisms; ii) the advancement of social inclusion; and iii) the empowerment of agents or actors that are actually or potentially subject to processes of social exclusion/marginalisation, thereby triggering changes of varying intensity in power relations. Having identified the central object of our research, it becomes indispensable to render operative the concept of social innovation, in order to produce a “roadmap” that makes it possible both to carry out a systematic comparative reading of the case studies and to define a set of indicators to be used in extensive analysis. In this paper, we begin by presenting the analytical dimensions that we consider to be most relevant: i) What is social innovation?; ii) Why is there social innovation?; iii) How does social innovation come about?; iv) Who produces social innovation?; and v) Where is social innovation produced? The discussion around these five analytical dimensions enables us to put forth a schematic roadmap that makes it possible to move forward in the analysis and interpretation of the actual social-geographical reality of social innovation. This roadmap emphasises certain aspects of social innovation, such as its nature, stimuli, resources and dynamics, as well as the characteristics of both its agents and its milieu, which, it is argued, tends to be characterised by a set of specificities that we can subsume under the concept of “plasticity”. In the second part of the article, we focus on the experience of microcredit in Portugal under the light of the conceptual framework presented in the first part. After a brief presentation of the concept and history of microcredit, we briefly describe its introduction in the national network space and then proceed to interpret it as an instance of social innovation – as such open to analysis according to the aforementioned dimensions. This interpretation of this particular example seems to confirm the heuristic value of the suggested roadmap, both in structuring the analysis of future case studies and in designing a set of indicators to be used in extensive research.
