How social innovations spread globally through the process of reverse innovation: a case-study from the South Korea

Abstract

Nowadays, innovation is no longer a peculiarity of developed economies. Indeed, more frequently, it occurs that innovations born in the so called "emerging countries" spread in the advanced ones. This phenomenon is well known as Reverse innovation (RI), and within the global innovation literature about RI, some authors refer to these reversed innovations as developed in order to solve social or economic issues, specific of emerging contexts. However, scholars use to connect innovation with social goal as primary benefit to another phenomenon: i.e., Social innovation (SI). Within the Social innovation literature, there is a lack concerning how it should be undertaken to spread globally. Thus, we applied the Reverse innovation process to Social innovations: through a case-study analysis, we link the two phenomena which have never been explored together in previous studies. The paper aims at understanding how Social innovations spread from emerging to more advanced markets, while implementing this inversion of the flow. Further, we want to explore which is the potential that a Social innovation has in the host market: in other words, if SI could lose, hold, reduce, or increase their original social connotation.