Despite the presence of a range of policy instruments that have some bearing on the capacity and character of social innovation in the UK, there is no common conceptual or applied understanding of the term in political or policy discourse. Social innovation is used interchangeably to refer to a range of related, but discrete, domains of activity such as social entrepreneurship, social impact, social investment, social finance investment, social economy, third sector, civil society, new public management and privatisation. It is, on occasion, equally used to describe a range of activities that would not necessarily qualify as social innovation according to the definition employed in this paper. The lack of consistency in use of the term makes it particularly difficult to review the breadth and depth of policy schema relevant to social innovation. Having said that, taken collectively, the disparate and at times incongruous policy instruments implemented, can be seen as a tacit but embedded policy agenda intended to scale social innovation in the UK.
Edmiston, D. (2015) The UK social innovation policy agenda (CRESSI working papers ; 19/2015), Oxford, Creating Economic Space for Social Innovation (CRESSI) project.
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