The book ‘New Frontiers in Social Innovation Research’, edited by Alex Nicholls, Julie Simon and Madeleine Gabriel, was published in September 2015. This important new collection explores the practice and process of researching social innovation, its nature and effects. Combining theoretical chapters and empirical studies, it shows how social innovation is blurring traditional boundaries between the market, the state and civil society, thereby developing new forms of services, relationships and collaborations.
The book also aims to:
- Challenge some of the emerging normative assumptions concerning the ‘promise’ of social innovation via critical analyses, extending and testing relevant theory, and via new empirical contributions.
- Bring together a range of perspectives and examples from around the world. The authors included here range across a variety of disciplines – management, political science, not-for-profit studies, sociology and economics – making this volume an avowedly multi-disciplinary endeavour.
- Contribute meaningfully to emergent policy debates across countries concerning the role and functioning of social innovation across the commercial, not-for-profit and public sectors (and in the blurred institutional spaces between them).
The book also includes essays from leading thinkers, such as Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Geoff Mulgan. For a quick flavour of the book read this blog about social innovation as a new kind of politics.
New Frontiers in Social Innovation Research was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation and Nesta. The book is published under a Creative Commons licence, and is available as a free download or in hard copy from Palgrave Macmillan.
