Socio-Tech Innovation

This book defines socio-technological innovation and lays out different aspects of technology innovation and adoption literature as applied to socio-tech innovation and entrepreneurship. Socio-tech innovation refers to novel solutions that involve development or adoption of technological innovations to address social and/or environmental problems with a view towards creating benefit for the larger whole rather than just for the owners or investors. Unlike conventional technological innovation, socio-tech innovation either develops a product specifically for underserved markets and adopts a model in which the market is not an afterthought but the rai-son d’etre. Social ventures have not been as successful in scaling up, though technology innovation-led ventures have; therefore, meaningful actionable insights that can help social ventures scale up successfully can be gleaned by this process. This book offers researchers in innovation and entrepreneurship programs a unique and interdisciplinary approach to studying social innovation that is grounded in technology innovation. This book features a series of socio-tech venture cases that illustrate these dynamics and can be used in undergraduate and graduate courses.

Latha Poonamallee is Associate Professor and Chair of Management & Social Innovation at The New School, USA. 
Joanne Scillitoe is the inaugural Paul Jennings Chair in Entrepreneurship and a Professor of Management at California State, Northridge, USA. 
Simy Joy is a Research Fellow at the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode, India.

A key premise of this book is to understand what qualifies as a “socio-tech venture” and, perhaps more importantly, what does not qualify! While exuberance to embrace all things “social” can be exciting and productive, emphasizing “all things social” is not and should not be the same as “accepting as social all things.” Scillitoe, Poonamalle and Joy approach that distinction with an important, critical eye, such as where – as the book describes it – “social impact is a byproduct at best” (Introduction). This book’s efforts are a welcome and useful bridge between theory and practice by exploring experiences of a discrete and diverse collection of companies and their principals. The technology thread provides a convenient way of more easily finding similarities and differences with regard to early points of decision and the choices made. That socio-technology thread should not discourage a more general reader from delving deeply and extrapolating how the lessons and their contexts can apply more broadly, especially to identifying those situations and approaches that result in what I call “differentiated social good.”

-John Tyler, General Counsel, Secretary, and Chief Ethics Officer, Kauffman Foundation

This is an important book in the social entrepreneurship conversation, emphasizing the role of technology as an addition to the usual discussions about entrepreneurial character, innovation and social incentives. We are drawn into engaging cases – many in India and Africa, but also in Mexico and the USA – where technological resources are servants in addressing social challenges in a way that is not only impressive but can inspire new and creative responses to human need. A potential textbook, but also a contribution to scholarly conversation about social entrepreneurship and social enterprise

-Ana Maria Peredo, Professor Political Ecology, Former Director Research Centre for Co-operative and Community -Based Economies. University of Victoria, Canada