Social Innovation and Value Creation towards Sustainable Business

Dear Colleagues,

The drive to be sustainable is affecting all aspects of our lives. Since the publication of the Bruntland Report, sustainable development has progressively captured the attention of entrepreneurs, politicians and investors. The United Nations, in defining the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), identified entrepreneurship as a key element for addressing sustainable development challenges. In 2019, Business Roundtable released a new “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation” and outlined a modern standard for corporate responsibility, committing boards to lead companies for the benefit of all stakeholders: customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and shareholders. In 2020, BlackRock announced a rearrangement of its investment portfolio considering environmental sustainability at the core of value creation. The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the positive effects of social innovation. Social entrepreneurship and social innovation are still in a nascent stage, and there is a need to develop a shared understanding of not only what is meant by the term “social innovation”, but also its links with social entrepreneurship and sustainable business. Several papers have addressed specific aspects, but to date only one holistic attempt to gather these different aspects can be found in the field of entrepreneurship, where scholars have developed a new orientation that captures the needs of the present-day landscape: humane entrepreneurship (HumEnt, Parente et al., 2020, 2018; Kim et al., 2018).

On the other hand, sustainability has declined in different ways, not only in terms of environmental goals (O’Neill and Gibb, 2016) but also following social entrepreneurship research trajectories in which social needs become entrepreneurship goals (Lumpkin et al., 2013) incorporating social responsibility (Shepherd and Patzelt, 2011; Schaltegger and Wagner, 2011; Kuckertz and Wagner, 2010), acting “to improve the quality of life in the local community” (Parente et al., 2020, p.15.16).

Synthesizing several key concepts derived by other disciplines, such as system thinking (open system aspects) and natural and ecological sciences, the viable systems approach (VSA) (Barile et al. 2014) regards organizations as viable systems in specific contexts, whose main purpose is to survive.

Each organization should maximize its probability of survival, aligning its goals with the goals of other organizations or institutions (namely, supersystems and subsystems). So, the VSA approach places the organization’s goals in a dynamic relationship system in which each organization tries to adjust its structure to better fit the context evolution.

The main goal of this Special Issue is to collate different insights into social innovation through asking if and how value creation and value co-creation (Grönroos and Voima, 2012, 2013; Vargo and Lusch, 2004, 2008) can facilitate the set-up of sustainable business. In particular, the aims of the Special Issue are to:

• Develop a shared understanding of the term “social innovation”;
• Determine the nature of the relationship between social innovation, value creation and sustainable business;
• Analyze the relationship between social innovation, social entrepreneurship and sustainable business, adopting specific theoretical approaches;
• Develop an oversight of existing research into social innovation and social entrepreneurship;
• Through cross-cultural studies, identify core issues arising from existing research into social innovation and social entrepreneurship;
• Identify the intersection between social innovation, entrepreneurship, and sustainability for the development of local and regional areas;
• Identify future areas of research.

Theoretical and empirical papers based on both quantitative and qualitative methodologies are welcome.

Prof. Dr. Antonio Botti
Dr. Massimiliano Vesci
Guest Editors

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