Sustainable and smart product innovation ecosystem: An integrative status review and future perspectives

Effectuation theory invests agency—intention and purposeful enactment—for a new venture creation in the entrepreneurial actor(s). Based on the results of a 15-month in-depth longitudinal case study of Amsterdam-based social enterprise Fairphone, we argue that effectual entrepreneurial agency is co-constituted by distributed agency, the proactive conferral of material resources and legitimacy to an eventual entrepreneur by heterogeneous actors external to a new venture. In the context of social movement activism, we show how an effectual network pre-committed resources to an inchoate social enterprise to produce a material artefact because it symbolised moral values of network members. We develop a model of social enterprise emergence based on these findings. We theorise the role of material artefacts in effectuation theory and suggest that, in the case, the artefact served as a boundary object, present in multiple social words and triggering commitment from actors not governed by hierarchical arrangements.

Social Enterprise Emergence from Social Movement Activism: The Fairphone Case

Social innovation governance and the role of universities: Cases of quadruple helix partnerships in Italy

Responsible innovation ecosystems: Ethical implications of the application of the ecosystem concept to artificial intelligence

Social innovation is related to new products, services, and models aiming to improve human well-being and create social relationships and collaborations. The business model innovation (BMI) context can foster social innovation and can be applied in social innovation projects and initiatives. What is important for social BMI is the social mission, which needs to be defined in order to be able to move forward with the strategy, the value proposition, and the best practices of the business. Based on the existing social innovation literature and case studies, this paper proposes an “ecosystem” approach that can provide an integrated framework for social business models. This approach adopts the quadruple/quintuple helix innovation models which are able to promote social innovation, enabling a locus-centric and triple-bottom-line-centric entrepreneurial process of knowledge discovery and exploitation. Such a framework may help to study the role, nature, and dynamics of social co-opetitive fractal ecosystems, given emphasis on civil society, political structures, environment, and sustainability. In addition, the social innovation case studies presented in this paper highlight that targeted open innovation is a key element for social BMI.

Social Business Model Innovation: A Quadruple/Quintuple Helix-Based Social Innovation Ecosystem

The concept of “smart city” is acknowledged by researchers and practitioners as a promising solution to address the challenges of urbanization and promote urban sustainability. Therefore, the assessment of smart cities has become a significant area of research. The current paper defines an evaluation framework by adopting 52 indicators classified under six smart pillars. Specifically, the PROMETHEE II method is used to rank 17 cities worldwide, with Singapore and Copenhagen achieving the highest performances. The sensitivity analysis for the two main parameters of the PROMETHEE II method validates the robustness of the results. In addition, the presented results (PROMETHEE II rankings) are compared to other well-known smart city evaluation frameworks in order to assess their validity.

Theodora Valvi

Papers

Social Business Model Innovation: A Quadruple/Quintuple Helix-Based Social Innovation Ecosystem

Measuring Smart City Performance: a Multiple Criteria Decision Analysis Approach