Social innovation: content, subject forms and classification

Abstract

Importance. Social innovations have been the object of close attention of many domestic and foreign economists over the past twenty years. Their study is characterized by an interdisciplinary approach. Nevertheless, many important aspects of this phenomenon are insufficiently studied or are controversial. The latter include the essence of social innovations, their features and content characteristics, and subject forms. The above reasons lead to the need to classify social innovations according to a number of features that can be used to identify their categorical status, to identify distinctive features from such categories as innovations in the social sphere and innovations in the public sector.
Objectives. Author’s study of the content of social innovation. Study of the subjective forms of social innovation from the standpoint of the project and institutional approach. Classification of social innovations according to criteria: according to the spheres of public life, according to the level and degree of scale, according to the institutional form of expression, according to the subjects of interaction.
Methods. In the process of achieving the set goals, a set of scientific approaches was used: historical-genetic, systemic, project-based, institutional, and structural. The work uses the techniques and methods of formal and dialectical logic (analysis and synthesis, comparisons, analogies, the unity of the historical and logical). The research is based on the study of current monographic and periodical economic literature.
Conclusions and Relevance. The conclusion is made about the understanding of social innovation as a set of qualitative changes in the areas of formation, development and implementation of human and social capital in order to increase the level of personal and social well-being. The specificity of social innovations is determined by their characteristics: strategic focus, inertia, synergy, riskiness. The participants in the social and innovative process are considered from the standpoint of the project and institutional approaches. Within the framework of the project approach, the main subjects are: customer, investor, manufacturer, consumer; within the institutional framework – households, firms, the state. The typology of social innovations is characterized by great diversity, multicriteria and is significant both in theoretical and applied aspects, since the identification of types of social innovations allows you to form a holistic and
complete idea of the object under study, as well as to identify the priority directions of their development.