{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02388663967611336, 'fraction_numerical': 0.005263157894736842, 'mean_word_length': 5.401554404145077, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Understanding social innovation: from innovation systems to innovation functions

The concept of ‘social innovation’ faces as many opportunities as risks. It has the chance to get established as a valid approach of strategic action in challenge-driven policies or to remain a ‘buzzword’ or ‘catchword’ in the policy discourse when attention needs to be placed in non-technological innovation. It can become a recognised type of innovation or remain the ‘other’ category following more ‘mainstream’ types of innovation. It can offer a new way of understanding and broadening the concept of innovation to better acknowledge the social reality or remain a fuzzy or unclear type of innovation. It can bridge different policy and academic communities or it can stay a contested concept with some communities defending the ‘social’ part and others the ‘innovation’ part of the concept. The EU-SPRI Exploratory study on Social Innovation Futures aspires to bridge the increasing distance between the ways social innovation is understood within policy and scholarly communities, and the mainstream of science, technology and innovation studies, as well as to examine the different ways in which the notion has been used in practice and isolate the underlying innovation processes involved (Benneworth et al., 2015). The different types of fuzziness surrounding the concept of social innovation can form four main groups: a) fuzziness between normative-policy goals and objective-scholarly understanding, b) fuzziness in the actual ontological foundations of the way social innovation is used between different disciplinary communities, c) fuzziness in the extent to which these concepts are concerned with innovation strictu sensu, and d) fuzziness inherent in different innovation studies traditions that themselves use the term ‘social’. (ibid.) In response to this fuzziness the literature review 2 aims to shed some light in better understanding social innovation as a coherent innovation concept analysing it through the lenses of a classic innovation studies, starting from that of innovation systems. In the first instance it seems that the technological innovation system (Carlsson and Stankiewicz, 1991; 1995) might be the most relevant approach to social innovation with the term ‘technology’ encompassing a knowledge field, or a product or artefact, or a set of related products and artefacts aiming to satisfy a particular function, such as health care or transport.