The Monitoring of Social Innovation Projects: An Integrated Approach

Abstract

When the Municipality of Turin first decided to invest in social innovation, a public program and a network of partners were created, and a procedure to support social innovation start-ups was developed, and applied for the first time in 2014. After selection and funding of several young social entrepreneur projects, the Municipality activated a monitoring process. Different methodological approaches, including cognitive mapping, actor network analysis and multicriteria analysis, have been combined to analyse the behaviour of these start-ups and to evaluate whether they would address the social needs of their specific fields, and develop business projects as part of an inclusive and sustainable economy. Each element of this analysis has been proposed and discussed in relation to the monitoring and decision processes. The adopted multi-methodology and its results are here presented as a proposal for new models, metrics and methods for the social economy. © 2019, Springer Nature Switzerland AG.