Dr Nadeen Purna

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.