Diving into Social Innovation: A Bibliometric Analysis

Building the European Social Innovation Database with Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning

Social innovation is widely defined as technological and non-technological new products, services or models that simultaneously meet social needs and create new social relationships or collaborations. Despite a significant interest in the concept, the lack of reliable and comprehensive data is a barrier for social science research. We created the European Social Innovation Database (ESID) to address this gap. ESID is based on the idea of large-scale collection of unstructured web site text to classify and characterise social innovation projects from around the world. We use advanced machine learning techniques to extract features such as social innovation dimensions, project locations, summaries, and topics, among others. Our models perform as high as 0.90 F1. ESID currently includes 11,468 projects from 159 countries. ESID data is available freely and also presented in a web-based app. Our future workplan includes expansion (i.e., increasing the number of projects), extension (i.e., adding new variables) and dynamic retrieval (i.e., retrieving and extracting information in regular intervals).

A Social Innovation Model for Sustainable Development: A Case Study of a Malaysian Entrepreneur Cooperative (KOKULAC)

In Malaysia, social innovation programs are fully supported by the government. However, reports and findings on the related matter have yet to be comprehensively collected due to the current interest. Therefore, the aim of this paper was to provide a better insight and understanding on how social innovation projects could assist in achieving the SDG agenda. Since social innovation is emerging and has just recently been embraced in Malaysia, we present the study as a case based on an entrepreneur cooperative, named KOKULAC, with a grounded theory analysis as a core approach. The findings suggest that there are five sustainability development goals that are very closely related to KOKULAC’s agenda. These goals are no poverty, zero hunger, decent work and economic growth, responsible consumption and production, and partnership for the goals. In addition, the case also presented how the values of sustainable development spur greater social benefits of shared prosperity. We conclude that the proposed model contributes to the expansion of innovation capability theory by shaping the innovations within the scope of social needs, which could be applied in other settings. For future research, we recommend a higher integration between the social innovation model and dynamic capabilities of the networking structures.