This book helps make sense of the emerging and established social innovations that have disrupted and are disrupting the world of finance. Written in an engaging style, this book offers a systematic study of social innovation in the financial services. It introduces the fundamental concepts of financial social innovations (FINSIs), places them in the context of the broader literature, and provides a new framework for understanding and organising these innovations. The book applies the framework to seven existing FINSIs to illustrate their important components and explore their benefits as well as the more negative or harmful aspects to society. These seven FINSIs are microfinance, peer-to-peer (P2P) lending, crowdfunding, mobile banking, impact investing, digital cryptocurrencies, and social impact bonds. The easy-to-follow framework will help to ground the reader’s understanding of FINSIs as the existing ones evolve and new ones are developed. This book is ideal for courses on social innovation, social entrepreneurship, and financial innovation in departments of business, economics, social sciences, and political science.

Could Wal-Mart offer a better solution to healthcare than Medicaid? Could GE help reduce global warming faster than the Kyoto protocol? Social Innovation, Inc. declares a new era where companies profit from social change. Leading corporations like GE, Wellpoint, Travelers and Wal-Mart are transforming social responsibility into social innovation and revolutionizing the way we think about the role of business in society. Based on four years of measuring the social strategies of America's leading corporations, Jason Saul lays out the five strategies for social innovation and offers a practical roadmap for how to get started. Explains the fundamental shift in the role of business in society, from social contract to social capital market Identifies the 5 social innovation strategies: submarket products and services, social points of entry, pipeline talent, reverse lobbying, and emotive customer bonding Offers step-by-step guidance for creating economic value through positive social change Social Innovation, Inc. is about making social change work for the business, and in turn staying relevant in the new economy.

In the world of creating new ventures with the single goal of achieving financial profitability, it is well known that nine of ten startups are likely to fail. For new social ventures that have the twin goals of financial profitability and social inclusiveness, the chances of failures are even higher. This book provides insight into the common struggles of social activists and the strategic responses necessary to not only overcome their organizational issues but also address the world’s pressing social challenges. The book not only traces the journey of the social activists in growing their social ventures to flesh out real-life issues but also introduces the latest management thinking on social innovation in daily business decision. This book makes a useful contribution in furthering the concepts of social innovation and entrepreneurship and inspiring more change agents to create and implement effective, scalable and sustainable solutions to address social issues and meet the needs of the disadvantaged groups in the society.

As we grapple with how to respond to some of the world’s most pressing problems, such as inequality, poverty and climate change, there is growing global interest in ‘social innovation’ as a potential solution. But what exactly is ‘social innovation’? This book describes three ways to theorise social innovation when seeking to manage and organize for both social and economic progress.

This book aims at a comprehensive discussion of economic space for social innovation, addressing especially marginalized groups and the long-term projects, programmes, and policies that have emerged and evolved within and across European states for more equitable, inclusive, and sustainable societies.

Social Finance is a rapidly advancing area of practice, policy and research, with alot of unanswered questions. What does it amount to? What is it to be 'social' in finance? How do you value assets that offer a social as well as a financial return? This book provides a collection of authoritative essays on these and related topics. The essays embrace the different manifestations of social finance, collate existing research, set out the controversies, offer theoretical insights, and advances, and draw together the ideas of the leading thinkers in the field. Contributors to this volume are leading exponents and practitioners of social finance and leading academics from the main relevant disciplines and fields of study. This book is the first serious and comprehensive treatment of social finance and as such, will be of interest to academics with research and teaching interests in finance, social enterprise/entrepreneurship, public policy, business economics and international deveopement to name a few. If you want to understand and join in the academic and policy debates, or if you are working in one part of this field and want to understand how the landscape is being rapidly re-shaped, then this is an essential guidebook.

Social Innovation: Comparative Perspectives investigates socio-economic impact. Since it is hard to establish causality and to measure social properties when investigating impact, especially at the level of society, the book narrows down impact to one priority aspect: social innovation – understood as organizations’ capacity to generate novel ideas, ways and means of doing things, of addressing public and social problems of many kinds. This volume’s primary assertion is that the Third Sector, specifically through stimulating civic involvement, is best placed to produce social innovation, outperforming business firms and state agencies in this regard. By investigating actor contributions to social innovation across seven fields of activity, Social innovation: Comparative Perspectives develops our understanding of why and how the Third Sector is central to functioning, cohesive and viable societies. This volume is based on contributions of the project "ITSSOIN – Impact of the Third Sector as Social Innovation" funded by the European Commission under the 7th framework programme. It will be of insight across disciplines, in particular to the growing social innovation community, innovation researchers more generally and to non-profit scholars. The practical relevance of the book will be of interest to European and national policy makers and practitioners across different sectors.

This book addresses the practice of social innovation, which is currently very much in the public eye. New ideas and approaches are needed to tackle the severe and wicked problems with which contemporary societies are struggling. Especially in times of economic crisis, social innovation is regarded as one of the crucial elements needed to move forward. Our knowledge of its dynamics has significantly progressed, thanks to an abundance of studies on social innovation both general and sector-specific. However, despite the valuable research conducted over the past years, the systematic analysis of social innovation is still contested and incomplete. The questions asked in the book will be the following: 1. What is the nature of social innovations? 2.What patterns can be identified in social innovations emerging at the local level? 3.How is the emergence and spread of social innovations related to urban governance? More precisely, which conditions and arrangements facilitate and hinders social innovation? We explore these questions using different types of data and methods, and studying different contexts. In particular, we focus on innovations that aim at solving problems of the young unemployed, single parents and migrants. This analysis is based on original research carried out in the period 2010-2013 in the framework of a European project with a specific empirical research strategy. Research was carried out in 20 cities in 10 different European countries.

This open access book offers unique and novel views on the social innovation landscape, tools, practices, pedagogies, and research in the context of higher education. International, multi-disciplinary academics and industry leaders present new developments, research evidence, and practice expertise on social innovation in higher education institutions (HEIs), across academic and professional disciplines. The book includes a selected set of peer-reviewed chapters presenting different perspectives against which relevant actors can identify and analyse social innovation in HEIs. The volume demonstrates how HEIs can respond to societal challenges, support positive social change, and contribute to the development of international public policy discourse. It answers the question ‘how does the present higher education system, in different countries, promote social innovation and create social change and impact’. In answering this question, the book identifies factors driving success as well as obstacles. Furthermore, it examines how higher education innovation assists societal challenges and investigates the benefits of effective social innovation engagement by HEIs. The interdisciplinary approach of the volume makes it a must-read for scholars, students, policy-makers, and practitioners of economics, education, business and management, political science, and sociology interested in a better understanding of social innovation.

Our world is experiencing increasingly complex social and environmental challenges. The prevailing business models and, to some extent, capitalism per se, are frequently blamed for these problems due to their neglect of social and environmental values in favour of financial returns. Within this context, social finance has attracted the attention of governments, organizations, entrepreneurs, and researchers as a means of mobilizing resources and innovation with the goal of establishing effective long-term solutions. This edited collection summarizes, discusses, and analyzes new innovative trends in social finance. It features contributions that aim to highlight emerging trends (products, tools, and processes) in social finance, present a series of case studies related to the development, deployment, and scaling of social finance innovations, offer an understanding of how non-economic externalities are being incorporated, managed, and assessed in recent innovations, reveal the disruptive potential of social finance innovations by analyzing how they are redefining mainstream finance, analyze the scales – of operation and impact – of different innovations, and explore the complex relationship between social finance and social innovation. Featuring contributions from both the research and practitioner community as well as policy actors, the book provides more than a snapshot of the current social finance field by specifically highlighting the major challenges and difficulties that require the urgent attention of policymakers and social entrepreneurs.