Social Innovation - Udviklingen af et begreb og en begyndende forståelse af dette i en kommunal kontekst

bæck, peter

4. semester

Politik og Administration, Kandidat

2010

2010-06-18

76 pages

As a result of both the financial crisis and a change in demographics, there is an increased pressure on public spending in the public sector in Denmark. It is facing a series of issues on how to meet the consistent, and in many cases, growing expectations for welfare services with fewer financial resources. Innovation in the public sector and the potential for delivering more welfare for less money through this has caught the eye of the Danish government. In Globaliseringsreformen (regeringen; 2006), it was stated that ‘the public sector should aim at being amongst the most innovative in the world’. A number of international researchers and innovation funds have taken the notion of an innovative public sector beyond the traditional borders of the public sector, and have highlighted how there is innovation potential for the public sector in building new partnerships with individual and organized users. The reason for this is the unique insight these users have into the social economy, in particular unmet social needs in society, combined with a flexibility to innovate around these. This type of innovation is labelled social innovation. Initial research for this masters thesis showed that very little has been written on the term social innovation, which has laid the foundation for the first and main part of the thesis: to understand and define social innovation in a Danish context. The thesis has sought to do this by drawing on existing, and primarily international research, to define what social innovation is, and by developing a set of principles for what good social innovation is, how it can be understood. To understand what social innovation means in practice, the thesis’ second part takes a step down the abstraction ladder and seeks to understand social innovation in a public sector context. This is done through interviews with four chief executives of local authorities in the northern region of Denmark. The main findings in the theoretical work are that the primary resources for social innovation are the social innovator’s insight into resources in the social economy. They harvest these resources by constantly expanding their networks in the social economy, and by putting a focus on social value rather than profit. For the public sector a systematic approach to this means opening up public organizations so that users can modify and adapt public services based on their specific social needs, as well as public procurement processes that include social entrepreneurs and the services and social values they can create. Research into local authorities showed that none of them work systematically with social innovation. This was due to a lack of willingness to take risks, insufficient cross-sectoral cooperation, and a perception amongst the chief execs that a culture where stakeholders interact with public services and seek to co-design these does not exist at present in Denmark.

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