Dr Lauren Tuckerman

Social investment can act as an empowering funding mechanism that could activate the economic agency of marginalised people while addressing their social needs. Nonetheless, political agendas might cause divergence in the achievement of social investment’s potential benefits. To develop our understanding in this area, this paper aims to extract discursive policy framings of social investment by comparing the UK and Scottish Government policies to identify the use of social investment and its implications on social innovation. Using corpus linguistic methods that allows for a framing analysis, the paper’s findings are twofold. Firstly, both the UK and Scottish Governments share similarities in the framing of social investment policy, especially in the proclivity towards the privatisation of social welfare delivery using market mechanisms. Secondly, the governments differ in their intensity of conviction for social investment which creates divergent implications for social innovation practice in the countries.

Tackling the issue of healthy aging in society is complex. It requires an interdisciplinary perspective and different forms of innovation. This article provides a commentary on the role of innovation policy in addressing healthy aging, particularly in the UK context. We argue that the wide range of economic activities related to healthy aging is part of a hybrid domain rather than a single sector. This represents a new generation of innovation policy for healthy aging which prioritizes understanding how different actors can be connected to support a spectrum of types of innovation which will contribute to providing better goods, services, and practices for older people. We explore social innovation as it relates to hybrid domains such as healthy aging and discuss the role of place in creating policy which generates both societal and market value. We recommend that policymakers use these concepts to build a better understanding of the economies that are evolving around healthy aging and where opportunities exist to better conceptualize, connect, and support actors, initiatives, and places to optimize economic potential and social outcomes.

Community businesses contribute to the economic and social wellbeing of the communities in which they operate. As a subset of hybrid organizations, community businesses have unique challenges and opportunities related to their community embeddedness. Our study adopts an institutional logic perspective to understand the evolutionary boundaries of community business, which we argue, are shaped by the interplay of tensions between the social, market and community logics. While existing literature discusses institutional logics from a dichotomous angle, focusing mainly on the social and market logics, we argue that the introduction of a third logic (i.e. community logics) has ramifications for the evolution of hybrid organizations. The different trajectories may have implications for the social, community and economic impact that organizations can have. We draw on 39 qualitative interviews to provide useful insights for policy and practice on supporting community businesses.

Innovation can be a key mechanism to address some of society's greatest challenges, or it can contribute to them. There is extensive conceptual academic literature focused on how policy can be used to create more positive societal and environmental impacts through innovation, however, little empirical evidence exists to understand to what extent innovation policy in particular embeds the principles of social and environmental sustainability into its discourse. We aim to address this lack of evidence by using a critical discourse analysis and corpus linguistics approach to explore how UK Innovation Policy embeds the concepts of societal and environmental impact, and how it balances these at times conflicting paradigms into policy documents. We find that although there is some inclusion of key environmental and societal words these are predominately secondary to economic themes, signalling a ‘business as usual’ approach to innovation policy.

The concept of ‘open social innovation’ (OSI) has not yet been fully understood, particularly in relation to social enterprises (SEs). This paper explores the use of OSI as a means of achieving social change through two in depth, longitudinal, qualitative case studies with Scottish SEs. The researcher undertook participant observation for a year as well as conducting interviews and reviewing documents of the case study organizations. We build on Wikhamn (2016) by conceptualizing two approaches to OSI; ‘controlled’ which is closely connected to market-based attitudes, and ‘libre’ which is connected to the knowledge commons. Each approach has ramifications for how SEs achieve social change: either through exploitation of intellectual property (IP) as a means of income generation, or freely revealing to accelerate social impact. The ways in which SEs manage OSI could thus determine the impact they can have on tackling some of society’s most challenging social problems.