title: Social Innovation and Growth Independence: Knowledge and Co-Creation in Agency towards Growth-Independent Regional Development
Creators: name: Tschumi, Pascal
Publisher: name: Universität Bern
Year: 2022
Subjects: subject: 300 Social sciences, sociology &amp; anthropology
subject: 330 Economics
subject: 710 Landscaping &amp; area planning
subject: 910 Geography &amp; travel

description: Social innovations have gained interest in academia in recent years. They are defined as new forms of cooperation that provide solutions to social challenges, which can have a positive impact on society. As such, social innovations can contribute to influencing and changing institutions, such as social norms, regulations or policies. Thereby, they can contribute to regional development path transformations. In the face of the new “grand challenges”, such as climate change, migration, demographic change and maintaining healthcare provision, social innovations are discussed as contributing to regional development, which goes beyond traditional notions of regional (economic) growth. Thus, they may particularly contribute to changing regional development paths towards growth-independent development, where a society (in a region or locality), including its economy and its institutions, can continue to fulfil its functions, without being existentially dependent on economic growth.
Agency, defined as the social innovation actors and their activities, plays a crucial role for changing regional development paths. However, there is a lack of research investigating how agency in social innovations can induce regional development towards growth independence. Particularly, it is still unknown what types of knowledge social innovation actors use to influence regional development paths towards growth independence, and how co-creation contributes to creating such knowledge. This dissertation contributes to filling this research gap by investigating activities of social innovation actors, which have the potential to change regional development paths towards growth independence. The dissertation’s findings were gained by synthesising the results of five papers, which applied the methods of social innovation biographies and qualitative interviews to analyse social innovations in the Bernese Oberland, a Swiss mountain region facing several challenges, such as out-migration, lack of building land, and maintaining healthcare provision. The dissertation focuses on social innovations in the healthcare sector, where it is common to share knowledge in co-creation, and where actors might be particularly prone to change institutions.
The findings demonstrate that social innovation actors use their knowledge, which they acquired in co-creation, as well as independently of co-creation, for activities to influence institutions. These activities are similar to activities, which are central to change regional development paths. Furthermore, they are similar to activities in social innovations, which have growth-independent characteristics. Hence, agency in healthcare-related social innovations can contribute to changing regional development towards growth independence. Social innovations can thus support regions on their way to become more resilient to economic recessions and crises.