Social Innovation Blurring Boundaries to Reconfigure Markets

The study of social innovation offers the opportunity to grapple with the central real-world challenges of our time. Indeed, rather than conceptualizing social innovation as a subset of technological-economic innovation, it may be the case that the reverse now makes a more compelling case. As this volume underlines, social innovation offers potential solutions to climate change, the crisis of the welfare state, health pandemics and failures, social dislocation and inequality, and educational failure. The need to address -- if not solve -- these 'wicked problems' presents us with global challenges that will become increasingly evident in all our everyday lives. It is, therefore, the ultimate purpose of this book to suggest that a focus on the sixth wave of social innovation represents not only a scholarly opportunity but a global imperative.