Decision support for social innovation enabling sustainable development

Abstract

This paper offers a unique and powerful bottom-up methodology for social innovation promoting and securing Sustainable development goals (SDG’s) in a wide variety of social innovation contexts founded on a bottom-up approach : it identifies four sustainable development enabling factors, (SDEFs) that make social innovation contributions to sustainability in all its forms. We Employ three level (micro, meso, macro) model of social Innovation. In the first four sections of the paper, we show how the SDEF’s constitute social innovation success factors at the micro level, underpinning in ancient history, the enduing success of the Silk Road network of trade and, in recent history we reveal their role underpinning entrepreneurial innovation clusters bottom up. Yje concluding section shows how social innovation achievements implementing the SDEFs at the micro level can inform successful expansion into new contexts via adaptation and exaptation at the meso level and top-down facilitation at the macro level.