Assessing the long-term viability of social innovations for environmental sustainability

Project description

This research project looks to explore how social innovations can address environmental sustainability issues. Social innovations are nonmarket driven innovations that seek to benefit society (as opposed to individuals) as a whole, in addition to creating new collaborations. Also, we look to discover how social innovations can capture value by using the concept of sustainable business models.

By focusing on sustainable business models, we seek to understand how social innovations capture the societal value (including social and environmental value as opposed to financial value) they create to ensure that their social innovation can, in itself, be sustainable in the long-term.  This project investigates what constitutes a social innovation a social innovation and how they lead to a more environmentally sustainable society. Moreover, we look at how social innovations make money and/or how they evaluate the social value they create so that the organization surrounding the social innovation can be stable in the long-term.