Jürgen Howaldt, Director of Sozialforschungsstelle Dortmund, Central Scientific Unit of Technical University Dortmund and coordinator of SI-Drive Project

Why is Research in Social Innovation important for you?

Social innovation is an exciting topic for me, as it allows to me to think about innovation in a new way. Social innovations open new potentials for meeting great societal challenges and for the further development of our society. They rely on participation and involvement of different societal actors and open new perspectives for social sciences when analyzing and creating social processes. 100 years after Schumpeter, social innovations have become an indispensable key component of an emerging new innovation paradigm.

 What is the biggest challenge for Social Innovation Research?

The biggest challenge for Social Innovation Research is to learn more about the diffusion of social innovations and how they spread into society. We do not have a lack of good ideas or socially relevant inventions. The more important question is how they become part of new social practices that help us to cope with the grand societal challenges such as social exclusion, unemployment or climate change.

What result can we expect from SI-DRIVE?

The most important result would be to better understand the social mechanisms that make social innovations work on a larger scale. This could help us reshape our National Innovation Systems and our innovation policies to better promote social innovations.

Which book or article about Social Innovation should everybody read? Why?

I really like the french sociologist Gabriel Tarde (1843-1904) and his book ‘The laws of imitation’. Recourse to Tarde’s social theory, which is actually sociology of innovation, allows us to widen our perspective – which was narrowed to economic and technological innovations as described by Schumpeter and after him by the sociology of technology – to include the wide variety of social innovations.