Defining social innovation
Innovation is often given complex definitions. We
prefer the simple one: ‘new ideas that work’. This
differentiates innovation from improvement, which
implies only incremental change; and from creativity
and invention, which are vital to innovation but miss
out the hard work of implementation and diffusion
that makes promising ideas useful. Social innovation
refers to new ideas that work in meeting social goals.
Defined in this way the term has, potentially, very
wide boundaries – from gay partnerships to new
ways of using mobile phone texting, and from new
lifestyles to new products and services. We have also
suggested a somewhat narrower definition