Embedding Social Innovation: Shaping Societal Norms and Behaviors (WITHDRAWN)

Abstract

New products and services that tackle grand societal challenges often require changes in societal norms, values and expectations. This research investigates the question of how innovating actors shape these informal institutions throughout the innovation process by drawing on the literature on social innovation and institutional theory. In a comparison of four case studies, we observe that all innovating actors under study engage in a diverse set of practices to challenge and shape societal norms and expectations as well as user habits and routines throughout the innovation process. These activities can be clustered into unilateral, bilateral and multilateral change processes, depending on the number of actors involved. Our findings highlight how direct and indirect interactions between innovating actors and users along the innovation process shape the understanding of social innovation, and stress the central role of physical experiences and positive emotions among (future) users. Thereby, we provide for a more nuanced view of how companies shape the informal institutional environment throughout the different phases of the innovation process, which has been given little attention so far.