Social Innovation and Why It has Policy Significance (Report‪)‬

Introduction Social innovation represents a very simple idea--that innovative social action can create social value beyond the capability of existing systems. Social innovation can both create new ways of addressing old issues and accelerate rates of social change. For public policy interventions, a key proposition is that social innovation may be understood as a process that has distinctive preconditions and stages, and those preconditions and stages can be understood and acted upon to promote innovation. Alternatively if no positive effort is made to identify and facilitate social innovation processes, policy interventions may well create barriers and the potential leverage of social innovation will be lost.