Introduction to the special issue on universities and social innovation

Even before the Covid-19 pandemic, the world was faced with a number of severe challenges, including growing social inequality and exclusion, poverty, forced migration, and climate changes. These challenges have been described as ‘wicked problems’ since they exhibit multidimensional and multifaceted properties and are characterised by high levels of complexity. Recent academic and political discourses have primarily emphasised state-led and market-driven solutions, or technological fixes, to solve social challenges. However, neither the rules of the market nor the intervention of the State has successfully addressed the adverse effects of these challenges (Aoyama and Parthasarathy, 2018). Furthermore, the shock caused by the spread of Covid-19 is likely to exacerbate further the negative effects of these unsolved issues in both the global North and the global South. In this context, social innovation has emerged as a potential means to tackle complex social problems. Indeed, for more than a decade, policymakers, practitioners, and researchers have set their hope on social innovation to drive social transformations towards a more sustainable world (Haxeltine et al., 2017). The concept of ‘social innovation’ is not easily defined; several definitions and applications exist, each emerging from different research areas. However, it is possible to identify several core elements of the concept which are shared by the literature in the field of social innovation. These elements include (i) the process dimension, (ii) the inclusion of civil society and third sector actors, (iii) a focus on social change, (iv) the creation of social values, and (v) the aim of meeting unsatisfied social needs (Edwards-Schachter and Wallace, 2017). Following the transformative approach to social innovation developed by Haxeltine et al. (2017), we argue that social innovation can be defined as a response to social challenges that entails changing relations based on alternative ways of knowing, doing, framing, and organising, which contribute to a sustainable society.

In this special issue, we focus on the potential role that academia can play in work with social innovation. During the last several decades, universities have come a long way in the institutionalization process of the so-called third mission—the growing expectation that universities should contribute to economic development through entrepreneurship and innovation. This process has been coupled with an increasing establishment of support organizations such as technology transfer offices, science parks, and ‘incubators’ which are aimed at helping students and researchers commercialise their research. This is achieved by starting a venture, licensing, or patenting. The concept of the ‘Entrepreneurial University’, in which the boundaries between university and industry are expanded upon so as to include strong linkages in the knowledge creation process (Etzkowitz, 2003), started to be implemented across different countries following a triple helix approach (Cai and Etzkowitz, 2020). The triple helix approach emphasises the importance of commercial innovation and its requirements in terms of organisation and incentive structures. Furthermore, this approach focuses on marketable products, thereby pushing higher education institutes to prioritise the commercialisation of research results over more socially inclusive goals. Gidlund and Frankelius (2003) have called this preoccupation with commercial innovations over social, regulative, and organisational innovations the “technology trap”. On the one hand, it allows universities to achieve excellence in providing commercial technology to industry but, on the other hand, it hampers their ability to deliver innovations that are aimed directly at alleviating complex social problems and promoting inclusive development.

According to McKelvey and Zaring (2018, p. 596), the above scenario creates the risk that “universities are becoming knowledge businesses instead of social institutions”. A consequence of this is that social entrepreneurship and social innovation are largely overlooked in the modern university context. Simply put, there is a lack of attention toward the potential role of universities in supporting social innovation initiatives (Benneworth and Cunha, 2015; McKelvey and Zaring, 2018). Indeed, research on social innovation has focused mainly on the role of firms, the government, and NGOs (Westley et al., 2017), while the role of the university is seldom explicitly addressed, either in the transition to sustainability (Grin et al., 2010) or with regards to transformation (Westley et al., 2011; Olsson et al., 2014; Avelino et al., 2019). Noteworthy exceptions to this trend can be found in recent contributions in the field of sustainability science (Hart et al., 2015, 2016). One explanation for this omission is based on the observation that academic institutions lack the organisational structure and culture to become agents of change and thereby address the severe challenges mentioned above (Hart et al., 2016). The reason for this is because academic institutions are ‘bottom heavy’ (Clark, 1998) and consist of loosely coupled institutions (Benneworth et al., 2017). Universities are traditionally organised in faculties that are grouped around academic disciplines and contain power structures that tend to hamper, rather than support, interdisciplinary collaboration in research, education, or ‘third mission’ activities. Furthermore, universities are generally geared towards providing education and conducting research instead of focusing on the co-creation of knowledge in interaction with society as part of its third mission activities (Trencher et al., 2014).

We now ask: What does the future hold for universities as social institutions? In this special issue, we explore their actual and potential role as change agents for social innovation. We do this by examining the role of universities from a strategic perspective and by emphasising new ways of how universities can work with third mission activities. The six contributions that are included in this special issue collectively address how change is taking place on a strategic level and with regards to third mission activities. For a university to take on the role as change agent entails a decision made by the management team of the university, i.e., a top-down decision, and the result of bottom-up initiatives, when faculty members decide to set out new research avenues, for example, by involving new actors like NGOs and civil society. Moreover, to confront the severe challenges that the world faces, there is a need for collaboration between different actors—collaboration at the local and national level and international collaboration. This special issue illustrates how much the global North and the global South have in common regarding how the narrative of the ‘entrepreneurial university’ can be nuanced and how much universities can learn from each other. In the rest of this introduction to the special issue, we present an overview of the individual contributions and their implications for future research.

1. Rethinking the third mission

If we are to transform universities into change agents for social innovation, then we need to rethink the third mission that universities are responsible for and the university's role as a social actor. Generally, universities ascribe to the narrative of the ‘entrepreneurial university’ instead of expanding on the concept towards the notion of a ‘systemic Developmental University’,1 defined as a university that embraces the task of democratising knowledge so as to contribute to the sustainable development of society (Arocena et al., 2017). Developmental universities possess the potential to span the complex boundaries that are often encountered when multifaceted problems are addressed (Hart et al., 2015). Universities contain an extraordinary breadth of knowledge in a range of social sciences, natural sciences, medical sciences, and engineering that is relevant to addressing complex problems, they also can generate new knowledge, tools, and practices. Three contributions to this special issue offer new insights into this area, as they emphasise how the third mission needs to be re-conceptualised. The first do this by adopting a historical perspective on the role of universities in complex and adaptive systems (CAS), the second by developing a comprehensive literature review of the state-of-the-art research on the role of universities in social innovation, and the third by presenting new empirical findings on universities in the global South.

Ola Tjörnbo and Katharine McGowan's contribution explores how transformative social innovation can trigger social changes within CAS. The authors reveal the specific contributions that research and academic institutions have brought to the development and consolidation of such transformative social innovation. Their in-depth analysis of historical social innovations, including the creation of National Parks in the US and the development of the Internet, reveals that academics and researchers were pivotal in providing the knowledge necessary to destabilize dominant system paradigms and trigger social changes. Tjörnbo and McGowan identify five channels through which academics have disrupted social innovations. Researchers can (i) provide the initial discovery; (ii) identify threats and challenge prevailing narratives; (iii) support niches conceived as protected spaces to experiment with social innovation; (iv) sustain shadow networks of social innovators; and (v) leverage vertical networks to allow social innovations to access influential supporters. Their results suggest that universities that currently aim to contribute to social innovation should reinforce their core mission of knowledge production and dissemination, thereby superseding traditional models of knowledge transfer since these models are ill-equipped to deal with transformative social innovation.

Changes in the way that the third mission is perceived and implemented are further explored in the contribution by Blaise Bayuo, Cristina Chaminade, and Bo Göransson. Based on a bibliometric survey of the literature on factors that drive social innovation activities at universities (and the organizational and institutional changes that are made to accommodate such activities), Bayuo, Chaminade, and Göransson found that expectations for universities to integrate social innovation into their core mission as a response to social problems are increasing. The number of research publications on issues related to universities and sustainability, where the third mission is a central theme, has grown steadily during the last decade. Their bibliometric survey reveals that the literature on university engagement in socially-orientated activities that are part of the university's third mission is conceptually well-developed, albeit with considerable gaps in the knowledge base relevant to this project. Whereas the rationales used by universities and higher education actors to engage in social innovation are relatively well covered in the literature, there exist only a small number of studies that address issues related to institutional change and incentive structures that are relevant to the ability of a university to engage in social innovation. An area that is even less researched is the impact that university engagement has on social innovation activities in research and outreach programs. This point is all the more severe since commercial innovations have a visible and direct impact in funding, the awarding of patents, and university rankings, while the impact of social innovation is often indirect and overlooked.

With their study on social innovation in Southern countries, Rodrigo Arocena and Judith Sutz focus on the potential contribution that universities make to social innovation. They argue that advanced technology should be harnessed to foster inclusive and ‘frugal’ innovations—a process in which universities should be the main actors. It is recognized that innovation work in the context of scarcity conditions is challenging. The authors suggest that universities introduce social innovation traits in canonical research, build research dialogues between universities and public enterprises, foster quality research in weak research sectors, and promote knowledge and innovation for social inclusion. A lack of resources is often the mother of invention, which implies that the lessons learned in Latin America are applicable in other contexts too.

2. Emphasising new ways of working and organising

One way for universities to approach their work on social innovation is to rethink their third mission activities. Community engagement strategies (Vargiu, 2014) are increasingly entering in universities’ agendas to expand the set of actors to partner with and to better focus on less commercial knowledge transfer projects. By engaging with local communities and civil society organizations, universities of both the Global North and South are trying to find new ways of organising to meet social innovation challenges. The last three articles in this special issue are specifically devoted to shed lights on emerging patterns of collaborations with more social and non-traditional actors. In doing this, universities are reconfiguring triple helix arrangements by learning to collaborate with NGOs and actively engaging in quadruple helix partnerships with government, business and civil society (Carayannis et al., 2019) to meet complex social challenges, and eventually working with informal enterprises following socially responsive models of engagement.

Balaji Parthasarathy, Supriya Dey, and Pranjali Gupta examine how a university partnered with NGOs so as to meet the needs of visually impaired children in India. As mentioned above, innovation capabilities are constrained by the weaknesses of the institutional context in the global South. While the global North can rely on dynamic national innovation systems where the triple helix relationship between government, industry, and university promotes the innovation process, the global South is characterised by high transactions costs and institutional thinness. In this context, the State has only a limited capacity to efficiently design market policies and provide public goods, thereby decreasing the possibility of private firms developing products and services that satisfy the needs of the poorest segments of the population. The presence of these ‘institutional voids’ that are neither occupied by the market nor the State is mitigated by the active role played by NGOs and civil society organizations. They act as intermediaries who possess unique knowledge regarding the unsatisfied social needs of disadvantaged social groups. Referring to their case study, the authors argue that if universities and research institutes are to benefit social innovation dynamics, then they have to learn how to partner with NGOs. In the global South, the role of NGOs must be reconsidered. Even though the context is different in the global North, the challenges are similar— many societies currently struggle with learning how to cooperate with NGOs and civil society organizations.

According to Marco Bellandi, Letizia Donati, and Alessandra Cataneothe participation of universities in social innovation initiatives should be understood under the framework of university community engagement, where partnering with local communities’ actors is at the core of universities’ strategies grounded in collaborative and participatory practices. To explore how universities engage in these types of collaboration, the authors examine three quadruple helix partnerships in Italy. In particular, Bellandi, Donati and Cataneodevelop and apply a conceptual framework which illustrates the governance process of social innovation when this is led by a wide set of different actors pertaining to the quadruple helix’ sectors. This contribution gives valuable insights on how social innovation can be managed by new actors’ constellations. The results show on the one hand that social innovation can be effectively managed by quadruple helix partnerships, in which universities perform crucial roles, such as mediating conflicts between partners and providing research skills; on the other hand that social innovation can be achieved through a collective effort mediated by the presence of a common nexus between the involved partners.

Il-haam Petersen and Glenda Kruss argue that universities should be more inclusive concerning the partners that they collaborate with. These authors have studied how universities can engage in social innovation and act as change agents by collaborating with non-traditional partners, for example, in informal enterprises. On the one hand, this collaboration implies that institutional borders are crossed over and, on the other hand, that researchers have to align themselves with locally embedded institutions and cooperate with new actors. Using empirical data from a South African township, they identify four types of engagement models, distinguishing between dominant, traditional knowledge transfer models and emergent, socially responsive models. This study sheds light on the importance of the institutional context by focusing on how collective agency affects systemic social change. Their study is also a practical contribution because the typology that they present can be used to assess current practices and inform future strategies.

3. Conclusion: a new way of viewing society

The arguably limited effect that both the State and the market have in addressing grand social challenges has increasingly attracted the attention of policymakers, practitioners, and researchers to the role that social innovations may play in this area. A growing interest in social innovation suggests a new way of viewing society. It is also an indication that a market-driven innovation system, by itself, cannot necessarily address complex social problems and issues of sustainability. This new perspective challenges the assumption of the triple helix model that government, industry, and the university are the sole actors in the innovation system. Instead, broader engagement of universities with new actors and new constellations of partnerships to enhance processes of transformative social innovation are called for. Recent work on the evolution of transformative social innovations (Westley et al., 2017) shows that what is currently considered to be ‘transformative’ is actually the result of numerous small-scale social changes that culminate in system change. These small-scale changes are defined as shifts in “the defining routines, resource and authority flows, or beliefs of the broader social system in which it is introduced” (Westley et al., 2016:12). In this special issue, we explore how one might purposefully set in motion these transformations and, in particular, investigate how universities can serve as engines for sustainability transformation through engagement in social innovations in different countries and institutional settings.

The six contributions that are included in this special issue provide valuable answers to these timely questions, not only by opening new avenues for future research on this topic but also by revealing the mechanisms through which significant societal changes can be achieved. Top-down and bottom-up initiatives are equally necessary if change is to occur. Furthermore, partnering with the local community (including informal enterprises, NGOs, and civil society organizations) is crucial to developing new solutions and enhancing inclusion and well-being in different institutional settings. In this sense, the global South and the global North face similar challenges, which demand that universities step forward and collaborate with socially excluded groups and design new institutional strategies for social goals. The contributions included in this special issue also reveal that universities can co-create knowledge, expand their capabilities beyond their boundaries, and move from disciplinary to interdisciplinary solutions. However, it is also apparent that a lack of trust in the collaboration process, the thinness of the institutional context, and the absence of adequate economic resources might hamper the involvement of a university in social innovation. Possible solutions to this problem may be found in establishing specific spaces, such as ‘Living Labs’ and ‘Science Shops’, which might facilitate interaction and the building of reciprocal knowledge between universities and local communities. In more fragile economic and social contexts, a lack of resources may well initiate socially innovative actions in the search for new solutions.

In fact, the search for new approaches is reinforced by a growing understanding of the extended role that universities play in advancing economic growth and social development. However, given the rapidly changing conditions and complex challenges that lie ahead, research that is focused on socially engaged universities in diverse countries can be characterised as still being in its infancy. The contributions that are included in this special issue constitute a step forward in this direction and should guide future researchers as they explore how universities can enhance their capacity to act as change agents for social innovation.