Processes of innovation within the social economy, or utopia

I thought that my blog could be another way of recording the coming 12 months, when I am expected to collect all sorts of interesting data. So I'll try to stick to that pupose. One feels tempted, however, to just moan and write about other less specific things, such as budget cuts, the real nature of community engagement or the claimed efficiency of certain right-wing led democracies. The activism of the social coolness (laid-backism, bacaneria in Spanish) as my friend calls it.

I have finally decided what the research question that will guide my fieldwork will be. How do social enterprises contribute to different types of innovation? This question can be understood in both a narrow and a broader sense. Narrowly, it refers to the innovations that take place (emerge? spark?) within organisations, be it products, processes, services, paradigms, positions, user-led, funding-led etc innovations. In a broader sense, it refers to the claim that social enterprises play very important roles within more encompassing processes of social innovation.

The literature review conducted this far refers contantly to the need to build the evidence base around the processes, the how, the mechanisms that facilitate or hinder innovation. I hope to be able to capture the diversity of innovations that can be found within the social economy, as similar processes have been well studied and documented in both the private and the public sectors. Although struggling not to be biased, I already know that I will find stillborn innovations, silent, invisible, intangible contributions to solve social problems, incremental and radical new ideas that lead to social change, major transformations and brilliant examples of how everyday actions can help to improve people's lives. The fieldwork conducted this far suggests that innovation means different things in different contexts, and that trying to operationalise the concept is like hitting a hard wall.

Aimed to be a critical examination of those pervasive claims about the innovativeness of the social enterprise sector/movement/whatever, I am secretly dreaming with challenging my own disbelief through an ethnographic study.

I, in essence, mistrust the portrayal of social enterprises as ideal vehicles to regenerate communities and revitalise economic activity. While some of them do it, on a contextualised, local scale most of the time, the majority of SEs that I know are indeed struggling to function, to break even, let alone to grow, reach scale, think about their impact or innovate. But I shall not let my previous experience be the only screen through which I see this task. I shall forget that out of the 21 SEs that I have advised closely, only 4 are trading in open, competitive markets. I shall remind myself that, historically, economic activity has been socially embedded.