Social Innovation in Focus: Comparison of Types of Success Factors

While social innovation covers many kinds of innovation activities, better empirical conceptualisation of it would assist in its development, management and evaluation. This paper develops the concept of social innovation by comparing it to other kinds of innovations, gives particular attention to types of success factors, and reviews data from 168 cases on resource efficiency. Statistical analyses with contingency tables show that there are differences in the distribution of success factors across types of innovation, and that social innovation differs in this respect from product, governance and service innovations. Therefore, it is a good starting point for the developers and managers of social innovation to approach it differently than other types of innovation, and accentuate the importance of social rather than technological or political success factors.