Social innovation-as-practice: establishing a social innovation program at a university

Abstract

Creating a culture for social innovation in universities can involve formalising and internalising processes that aim to support efforts towards using research results in society. This paper aims to contribute to the discussion on how the present higher education institution system promotes work with social innovation. The paper presents lessons from efforts to establish a (social) innovation programme in a university. The data used for this qualitative case study are board documents, motivation letters, evaluation forms, reports from working groups and a workshop with a survey. The paper approaches two research questions: (1) How can a (social) innovation programme operate within a university’s existing managerial, financial and social structures to facilitate researchers’ work with social innovations? (2) How can a (social) innovation programme that facilitates researchers’ work with social innovation at a university contribute to building a physical, intellectual, managerial, and logistic environment that can create a culture for innovation? With the first research question, the paper maps work on the pilot projects with initial motivations, early engagements in the programme, and future participation expectations. This connects to how the programme operates within the university’s existing structures. The second research question shows the implications of this work, looking at how the innovation programme contributes to creating a culture for social innovation at the university. The results show how the programme can contribute to a) support researchers in their own work by further developing their research results into actions of societal usefulness and b) establish an arena that can contribute to creating a culture for working with social innovation within the university. How this can be conceptualised as ‘social innovation-as-practice’ is then discussed. Based on the findings, suggestions about how the present system can be improved are offered.