Introduction

The field of social innovation has grown up primarily as a field of practice. There has been surprisingly little attention to theory, or to history, and at times even a disdain for intellectual input. Although there has been much promising research work, no major thinker has yet written about the topic; there are no clearly defined schools of thought, no continuing theoretical arguments and few major research programmes to test theories against the evidence.

But, to mature as a field, social innovation needs to shore up its theoretical foundations, the frames with which it thinks and makes sense of the world. Sharper theory will help to clarify what is and isn't known, the points of argument as well as agreement. It will help in the generation of testable hypotheses.

Above all, it may help to guide practice. Social theories, unlike theories in fields like physics, are inseparable from their purposes and their uses. Not all innovations are good, nor are all social innovations. So, theory needs to fuse three things: rigorous and objective analysis of patterns, causes and dynamics; normative analysis of social change from an ethical perspective; and guidance on how practitioners can do better in improving wellbeing, alleviating poverty or widening distributions of power.

Here I suggest some of the main theoretical currents that have flowed into the broad river of social innovation; I suggest how they may be synthesised, and the contribution that other fields may make. To summarise, I suggest that together these theoretical foundations show:

• that social innovations tend to originate in contradictions, tensions and dissatisfactions that are caused by new knowledge, new demands and new needs that make the transition from being personal to being recognised as social in their causes and solutions;

• that they then depend on a wide array of actors, including social entrepreneurs, movements, governments, foundations, teams, networks, businesses and political organisations, each with different ways of working, motivations and capacities, but united by a belief in plasticity and what I call (drawing on Albert Hirschman), the ‘rhetorics of progress’;

• that innovations gain traction only when they can attract vital resources, which include money, time, attention and power;

• that the processes whereby innovations develop have strong analogies with a much wider family of evolutionary processes that multiply options and select and then grow those best suited to changing environments;