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Abstract
Although social innovation is stimulating tremendous interest among scholars and policy-makers, its emergent catalysts are insufficiently understood. This paper thus identifies and explores a relevant collaborative organization, the social innovation community (SIC). Found in cosmopolitan cities, SICs are held together by recognizable shared cultures and online/offline spaces. This account sets out a basic categorization of SICs, profiles their salient features, and offers an original definition. SICs support early-stage social entrepreneurship but may also help to introduce social innovation into new cultural settings, re-programme wider innovation circuits, and promote productive collaboration amid diversity.
Acknowledgements
The author would also like to sincerely thank the following people and institutions for their invaluable support: Lidia Gryszkiewicz, Xibai Xu, Jun Han, Institute of Creative and Cultural Entrepreneurship (Goldsmiths, University of London), Nissan Institute of Japanese Studies (University of Oxford), the Social Innovation Osaka Network and Haruyasu Se, Impact Hub Kyoto, KSIA, the Knowledge Salon, Osakan Space, Juho Viitasalo, Keichi Takahashi, Mika Ichimura, Tomoko Fukushima and all other Kansai RISE core members and community members, Alex Nicholls, Marc Ventresca, Yasser Bhatti, the Rethinking Business class of 2013 at SBS (University of Oxford), the Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship (University of Oxford), Green Templeton College (Univeristy of Oxford), the Skoll Foundation, Karenjit Claire, Andromache Athanasopoulou, Impact Hub Islington, Richard Brownsdon, Brian Condon, Hideyuki Inoue, Noritoshi Furuichi, Tomu Ogawa, Mikito Terachi, Japan Foundation, Japan Foundation Endowment Committee, Ralf Bebenroth, Keith Jackson, Wataru Takahashi, Emiko Ochiai, Michele Acuto, Wallis Motta, Lina Sonne, Vili Lehdonvirta, Daniela Lup, Christian Busch, Aarne Rissanen, Krista Sirola, Nicolas Friedrici and all other members of the newly formed Entrepreneurial Spaces & Communities Group. I also thank David Stark for inspiration.
Notes
1. This school, Kyoto Katei Jogakuin, was originally opened in 1949. For related news reporting, see Karazuma Keizai Shinbun (2013). The author personally attended the described event.
2. These inaugural activities unfolded exactly eight years after the birth of the first Hub in London in 2005.
3. For example, in 2012, Japan had a rate of ‘entrepreneurial intentions’ (among its adult population of non-entrepreneurs) of just 2% compared with 17% in France and 10% in the UK (Global Entrepreneurship Monitor 2012, 20–21).
4. See Katz and Bradley (2013) – who highlight Portland, OR, as leaders in sustainability-related innovation – on innovative cities and regions in the USA.
5. See the Impact Hub website (http://www.impacthub.net/). The organization has recently been rebranded as the ‘Impact Hub Global Network’ while individual centres are known as ‘Impact Hubs’. It is worth adding that dozens of other (non-Hub) co-working spaces have sprung up across Japan recently; most of these serve tech entrepreneurs, designers, mobile corporate workers and freelancers rather than social entrepreneurs. The Osaka-based Knowledge Salon, located inside the Grand Front Osaka shopping complex, is an example of a corporate-oriented, high-end hub.
6. See Solve (2013) and the Impact Hub website. Though not a directly comparable figure due to different styles and intensities of support, note that Ashoka reports on its website that it is (as of May 2014) supporting a total of 3,000 individual social entrepreneurs in 70 countries.
7. It appears that Hubs may be the original inspiration behind commercial co-working facilities, many of which may, however, lack this community element (Egan 2011).
8. Based on the assumption that only cosmopolitan cities, regions and networks can provide SICs with a fertile environment that is sufficiently diverse and globally connected, the SIC concept developed in this paper may not be applicable as such to smaller, relatively homogeneous cities or regions.
9. ‘Organizational form’ refers, at a general level, to those characteristics of an organization ‘that identify it as a distinct entity and, at the same time, classify it as a member of a group of similar organizations’ (Romanelli 1991, 81–82). There is, admittedly, no universal or uncontested way to classify organizations; this depends to an extent on the scholar's judgement and purposes.
10. The author agrees with one of this paper's anonymous reviewers that the spatial dimension of SICs, including the local–global distinction and SICs’ roles within particular city environments, requires fuller examination in future case studies.
11. However, see Bachmann (2014) on the fascinating evolution of the Impact Hubs’ global governance model and how it has transformed from a single-owner model to a co-ownership model based on a ‘one hub, one vote’ principle. Beyond examining such organization-specific (local or global) governance structures, future accounts should also inspect how isomorphic forces shape SICs, their legitimacy and their emergent collaborative governance models, building on earlier research on isomorphism and social enterprises (DiMaggio and Powell 1983; Dart 2004; Reid and Griffith 2006; Nicholls 2010).
12. This distinction is an important one to bear in mind for future purposes: insofar as SICs really behave as communities, even formally ‘open’ varieties will informally regulate participation so that admission to their core groups will not be automatic for new members.
13. The notable exceptions comprise recent conference papers by Xu, Han, and Toivonen (2013) and Busch and Lup (2013) as well as a NESTA report on ‘social incubators’ by Miller and Stacey (2014). To be sure, ‘community’ is not an unfamiliar construct in the literature: there is frequently a background assumption that social innovations should serve ‘disadvantaged communities’ or address unmet ‘community needs’. However, only a small minority of contributions explicitly theorize ‘community’ and apply this concept in carefully formulated ways (see e.g. Peredo and Chrisman [2006], on the community-based enterprise).
14. See Social Innovation Europe (2013) and Young Foundation (2006).
15. Incubators targeted at for-profit enterprises are far more common than ‘social incubators’; however, there is little clarity as to what defines ‘an incubator’ beyond the fact that it strives to offer early-stage business development support. There is even less agreement regarding what constitutes success for incubators (Kempner 2013).
16. The author has attended relevant events and meetings in London regularly since October 2013, and he has been a (paying) member of Impact Hub Islington since March 2014.
17. Although enacted out of personal interest and motivation rather than as part of a systematic study, through co-founding this organization, the author gained first-hand knowledge of the key challenges involved in setting up a SIC in a relatively difficult cultural and institutional context. Contrasting with ‘exploratory research’ (that while open-ended must be preplanned and purposive), this co-founding experience may be described as a process of inductive discovery through serendipity (Stebbins 2008; also see Rivoal and Salazar 2013; Merton and Barber 2006).
18. Community of practice-style sub-groups may, however, be found to exist within this general diversity, e.g. when some SIC members come together to learn skills such as web design or programming in workshops.
19. The cofounders of Sandbox, a mobile transnational SIC, specify that their organization should offer the following benefits to members: provide moral support; help members search for people or expertise; offer a global home; provide spread and exposure; and provide a forum for feedback and learning (Pfortmüller and Luchsinger 2013, 46–47).
20. This presents another important concern for future inquiries: how do these SICs define a ‘promising social entrepreneur’? How are the key required features of such individuals socially constructed? These questions may be closely linked to the other governance-related issues mentioned in footnote 11.
21. See penultimate section and footnote 33. A full review of the community logic in collaborative settings is omitted in the present account as this would require a paper of its own.
22. Bill Drayton of Ashoka as well as Geoff Mulgan of Nesta are unquestionably among the pioneers of this global culture, having created a new language that strategically mixes concepts from the private and public sectors.
23. Presentation at ‘Collaborating for Impact: What Does it Take?’, Impact Hub Kings Cross, London, 2 October 2013.
24. For Turner, symbols are not only laden with open-endedness and feeling but are ‘triggers of social action – and of personal action in the public arena’ (Turner 1975, 155).
25. SICs will often have one or two main forums that contain general announcements, while more personal exchanges or team-specific communications take place through Skype, Facebook, LINE, e-mail or affordable groupware.
26. See Pfortmüller and Luchsinger (2013) on why Sandbox found it best to abandon efforts to develop original platforms and instead resorted to digital bricolage. Also, see Schick (2012) regarding IBM's ‘Connections’ suite of social media tools for a contrasting example of how MNCs invest in developing expensive proprietary social media platforms. While the Impact Hubs have created the members-only Hubnet platform, a recent study found this platform to have severe design limitations, reducing it to ‘a trans-social media’ used for the purpose of taking conversations elsewhere, with the partial exception of core leaders (Featherstone 2014).
27. ‘Digital bricolage’ is the author's original term. See Di Domenico, Haugh, and Tracey (2010) regarding the origins and uses of the terms bricolage and social bricolage in entrepreneurship research.
28. This is in line with classic formulations of bricolage in anthropology and organization studies (see Lévi-Strauss 1967).
29. In contrast with focused, formal discussion, this kind of communication around varied personal and professional topics is referred to ‘multi-level talk’ to distinguish it from work-focused talk that remains within relatively narrow boundaries. Multi-level, whole-person talk is often an essential trigger of collaboration as it opens up a far greater number of collaborative possibilities (potential points of shared interest, or glimpses of potentially fruitful recombinations).
30. In collaborative communities, coordination indeed relies on this type knowledge of others’ backgrounds and skills. Where a large pool of SIC members become familiar enough with one another's backgrounds to allow for spontaneous, effective coordination, SICs can effectively be viewed as integrated ‘knowledge systems’ resembling large firms (see Hecker [2012] for relevant approaches to conceptualizing collective knowledge).
31. This is not to say that most SICs currently make full use of the potential of Internet architectures; indeed, accelerating social innovation through such affordances may often remain more of an aspiration than reality.
32. This allows SICs to be distinguished properly from any classic or colloquial formulations of ‘community’, including the idea of community as the complete trinity of shared geographical space, common (holistic and emotional) ties and social interaction (Hillery, 1955; cited in Driskell and Lyon 2002, 375).
33. This last point does not preclude the possibility that in some cases SICs may spontaneously grow out of, or evolve around, co-working spaces that were never intended to become bases for such communities. Such processes of emergence pose yet another attractive research topic.
34. For example, for the founders of Sandbox ‘communities are defined by trust and shared values’ (Pfortmüller and Luchsinger 2013, 47).
35. Personal communication (Ashiya, Japan; 24 May 2013).