Social innovation - harnessing the potential of partnerships

Social innovation is multi-disciplinary. It cuts across sectors and fields of action. This has undoubtedly contributed to the diversity of meanings and uses of the term social innovation. The field of social innovation has developed primarily as a field of practice. It is made up of people acting and then sometimes reflecting upon and sharing their experience. The literature on social innovation is a strange mix of biographies of social innovators, studies of individual cases of social innovation and surveys of existing practice.. Currently, there are a large number of different definitions in circulation. It is important to develop a definition of social innovation and to start working with it in an academic way too.