Open Innovation: quali contributi per la Social Entrepreneurship?

This paper presents a theoretical model connecting three strategies for spreading social innovation – branching, affiliation and dissemination – to an organization’s confidence in achieving expected social impact and revealing new potential value. To this aim, we leveraged the open innovation paradigm as a theoretical lens to explain how the adoption of porous organizational boundaries affects on the likelihood and magnitude of social value created through scaling. Our model predicts that a strong relationship exists between the adoption of an open organizational structure and the likelihood to reveal potential social value. In addition, the similarity of the context where the social inovation will be scaled moderates this relation. Our paper contributes to the growth of knowledge in the social entrepreneurship field by suggesting new directions for further inquiry and to the extention of the explanatory power of the open innovation paradigm in the social sector.