Alex Nicholls and Rafael Ziegler (eds) Creating Economic Space for Social Innovation

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/prometheus.38.3.0374
• Pages: 374-378
• Published date: 20 December 2022
• Date: 20 December 2022
• Author: Judith Terstriep

Prometheus 374

BOOK REVIEW

Creating Economic Space for Social Innovation, Alex Nicholls and Rafael Ziegler (eds) (2019)

496pp., £85 hardback, Oxford University Press, Oxford, ISBN 9780198830511

This book provides a comprehensive discussion of economic space for social innovation, address-

ing in particular marginalized populations, long-term projects, programmes and policies that have

emerged within and across Europe. Even the title of the book arouses curiosity.

The reader may ask what social innovation and economics have in common. The rise of

social innovation in policy discourse across Europe, at least since the financial crisis of 2008–9,

signals a growing dissatisfaction with mainstream ways of thinking about innovation and its role

in economic development. Although social innovation is not a new phenomenon, policymakers

and academia increasingly perceive it as a way to cope with grand challenges. Accelerated by the

recent normative turn in research and innovation policy, which has made way for what has been

labelled ‘mission-oriented’ or ‘challenge-oriented’ innovation policy, social innovation has

become a central element on policy agendas at all governance levels. The forthcoming Horizon

Europe programme, for example, defines five missions and clear targets, intending to maximize

the impact of research and development, to sustain global competitiveness and to improve peo-

ples’ daily life. Likewise, the German High-Tech Strategy 2025, launched by the Federal Ministry

for Education and Research, claims to promote research into issues relevant to the German econ-

omy and society while emphasizing the role of social innovation. The country-wide Portugal

Social Innovation support programme, with its corresponding social impact bond, is a further

example.

But how do markets as socio-economic institutions relate to the poor, marginalized and

vulnerable? What are the drivers of, and barriers to, social innovation in various institutional set-

tings? What is public policy’s role in developing finance structures and wider ecosystems to

support social innovation development and growth? How can the impact of social innovations be

captured and measured at the organizational and national levels? In response to these questions

and the many, yet often unconnected, research activities in the field, the book introduces a novel,

theoretical approach to social innovation, the extended social grid model (ESGM). Combining

economic and sociological theory and ethics, the ESGM envisages revealing the power dynamics

and social structures that enable and constrain an individual’s life choices and capacity for action.

It provides the book’s core analytical frame. To move beyond a mere collection of chapters on

social innovation, the book aims to reflect the transdisciplinary collaboration of scholars across

Europe by bringing together their various perspectives in a comprehensive approach. The result is

a collection of inspiring contributions based on the ESGM that can serve as a reference for future

research, political and social practice. The book is in three parts: the first introduces the ESGM,

the second explores the model through longitudinal case studies and policy analysis, and the third

emphasizes the implications of social innovation for theory and practice. A detailed discussion of

the individual chapters would go beyond the scope of this review. Therefore, in the following, the

book’s core aspects are illustrated by explicating relevant results and exciting insights from the

reviewer’s perspective.

Theoretical foundation: the extended social grid model

To help the reader understand the various case studies, part I of the book sets out the ESGM model

and its theoretical groundings. Alex Nicholls and Rafael Ziegler provide the opening with their

DOI:10.13169/prometheus.38.3.0374