Social Enterprises: Organizations for Transformative Innovation

Transformative innovation policies aim at providing systemic solutions to socio-environmental challenges thanks to their "experimental", "reflexive" and "inclusive" character. In this context, we contend that social enterprises could be catalysts for transformative innovation towards less developed territories and socially-marginalized groups. We argue that including social enterprises in transformative innovation policies mitigates negative effects of innovation-based growth, making policies more socially and territorially inclusive. Following a syncretic approach between the literature on transformative innovation policies and on social enterprises, this paper identifies key dimensions capturing the transformative innovation potential of these enterprises: from distributed territorial patterns, to a directional social inclusiveness, reflexivity in terms of participatory governance and goals' monitoring capacity, and experimental character in terms of establishing partnerships with heterogeneous actors. We assess this capacity through an explorative cluster analysis on Italian social enterprises. The results show three distinct groups within the realm of context, suggesting a variety of entrepreneurial approaches going from fully to slightly transformative. The transformative readiness of social enterprises suggests that policymakers can advance piloting experiments and that actions supporting an appropriate innovation ecosystem for these organizations are required.