Summary of content

Social innovation is a rapidly emerging concept that has been put forward as a possible means of transforming the lives of people in both developing and developed worlds. Governments and foundations, meanwhile, are paying increasing attention to social enterprise, understood as non-dividend, non-loss businesses with a social purpose. In the United States an Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation was created within the White House under the Obama Administration. At the European level the EU has created a Social Business Initiative to help create a favourable environment. In Malaysia, government is developing an interest in this area and organisations such as the Malaysian Social Enterprise Alliance and Social Innovation Lab are helping to develop the social innovations of tomorrow.

The social economy, meanwhile, is understood to be the trading part of the third sector - the space between the traditional private and public sectors. It has been presented as an alternative means of organising the economy for the benefit of societal and environmental well-being.

This unique module critically introduces the student to the concepts of social innovation and alternative forms of economic organising. The module aims to equip students with a general overview as to how global and local circumstances shape social innovations, and to equip them with the knowledge and skills to determine what factors they should take into account when developing their own social ventures, or when creating an enabling environment for social enterprise.

Particular attention is paid to how different political, cultural and economic institutional environments favour the evolution of different forms of social innovation. Attention is paid to how different forms of social enterprises negotiate tensions between social and commercial objectives, for example. Students are then introduced to examples of new (and existing) legal forms for social economy organisations using examples of Italy, South Korea, th

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