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1. Introduction
With the growth of private and public sector services in developed and developing economies – around 67 per cent of global value-added is in services (The World Bank Group, 2015) – service innovations and social innovations are increasingly overlapping[1]. Notable service sectors in which social innovations occur are education (e.g. charter schools), heath (e.g. patient-centred models of health care), tourism (e.g. rural development initiatives), finance (e.g. crowdfunding, microfinance) and social services (e.g. social entrepreneurship).
It is surprising, given this overlap, that research on social and service innovation has proceeded largely as parallel research fields, rarely crossing. This is perhaps as much due to the different backgrounds of the researchers involved in these research fields, as it is differences in content (see recent reviews by Pol and Ville, 2009; Tepsie, 2012; Howaldt and Schwarz, 2010; Djellal and Gallouj, 2013; Franz et al., 2012; Reinstaller, 2013; Van der Have and Rubalcaba, 2013). Social innovation scholars tend to draw on sociology and on political science, while services innovation scholars tend to draw on the neo-Schumpeterian economics tradition.
This paper builds a bridge between social and service innovation research using the concept of multi-agent co-creation[2]. In the simplest case, there are two agents involved, such as the consumer and the firm. In other cases, co-creation may involve multiple agents, possibly from third sector organizations, public sector providers and policy makers, as well as consumers and firms. We operationalize the co-creation concept through a multi-agent framework. This captures the key aspects of the process of co-creation; i.e. the co-development, implementation and sustaining of social innovations. This builds on the Windrum and García-Goñi (2008) multi-agent framework, and is applied to social innovations for the first time.
Social innovations tackle pressing social, economic and environmental challenges facing society. They often involve multi-agent and multilateral networks, organized to design, deliver and sustain new services. Social innovations are increasingly professionally oriented. Third sector organizations, operating in social services and other public sector services such as health and education, are developing a wider range of solutions to meet social challenges[3]. Amongst these third sector organizations, voluntary, community and social enterprises have attracted particular attention amongst policy makers and researchers. It is argued that social entrepreneurs are better able to deliver more effective...