People-Centered Social Innovation: An Emerging Paradigm with Global Potential

Our time is definitely complex and increasingly marked by the clash and conflict of interests and policies. Growing social and economic inequality and the concentration of wealth marks our time as dangerous and unstable. A people-centered approach to social innovation rests on a number of important assumptions. First, social innovation was never a question of how to use the capitalist firm or the conventional market model as a blueprint for serving the needs of people. Second, the people-centered approach to social innovation adopted in this volume takes an important point of departure in Karl Polanyi’s understanding of economic activity which, he warned, could never be reduced to the virtues of markets. A people-centered orientation to social innovation is thus one powerful way to address the multidimensional challenges that confront policy makers, activists and marginalized groups worldwide. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book