The agricultural sector in Thailand, Taiwan, and Japan is facing a number of interrelated crises, including aging producers, falling market prices, changing consumer preferences, and biodiversity degradation. Small-scale farmers in these three societies have engaged in diverse collaborative initiatives with actors from the public, private, and third sectors to overcome these challenges. We illustrate these initiatives by combining the concept of societal entrepreneurship (Berglund et al. 2012) with a complex understanding of social capital (see Brunie 2009). Given that these initiatives are formed in distinct ways across these societies, the paper aims to answer the following research questions: What is the nature of the relationships (expressed as types of social capital) underlying the processes of societal entrepreneurship? How does social capital contribute to sustainable community development? How does it facilitate the scaling up of solutions through multi-sectoral collaboration? Using a case study approach, we aim to explore multi-sector initiatives in each context in depth, before identifying common patterns and key drivers for collaboration through thematic analysis. We have found that distinct drivers are involved in each context due to different types of social capital, including solutions, advocacy, and reconciliation.

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Social innovation is not only about tangible new products, services, policies, and laws, but also about changes in societal perceptions, values, and norms. In Japan, current policies for older people, including Long-Term Care Insurance, tend to focus on medical and long-term care and other forms of "support" for older adults such as a pension. Naturally, these policies depict older adults as the "beneficiaries," or the ones in need of support. However, when we look back at pre-modern Japan, it was not always like that. Although older adults did depend on support from family and community members, they also played an active role as a laborer and caretaker as well as providing useful knowledge for their family and community. Moreover, currently, in different areas suffering from a sharp decline in population, such as Okayama prefecture in western Japan, older people are actually playing the role of the supporter for groups of people who are in need, not only the aged population but also other demographics including young children and parents. Based on this historic "tradition" and the present reality, this paper argues that we need to reestablish the image of (at least some) older people as capable of taking a more active and responsible role in society, and position them as such in the new "welfare society" systems in order to replace the conventional "welfare state" model.

Recently art is increasing its presence as an “creative industry” to sustain local communities, by generating socio-economic values. Still, whether art can be a tool for social innovation to regenerate communities, especially in rural areas in aging societies, is an unanswered question. In this paper, we take the example of Benesse Art Site Naoshima and Art Setouchi in the island area of Western Japan, viewing how it transformed from a corporate-established museum to a regional initiative involving various stakeholders, including local residents and thus creating the process of dialogues and collaboration. By reconstructing the existing evidence with supplementary fieldwork and interviews and applying a tri-sectoral analysis of the processes, we present how the art sites developed to become a social innovation. We then illustrate the role of two key individuals, Soichiro Fukutake and Fram Kitagawa, and shed light on the different values and methodologies they brought into these art sites. We argue that such contributions from the civil society and philanthropy sector made a critical contribution to characterize BASN and Art Setouchi, in addition to the well-documented and recognized efforts from local government and business sectors. Finally, we propose that such values, methodologies, and persons who can embody and implement such values are crucial if other countries and areas are to replicate the model.

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