Journal of Product Innovation Management

Gloria Barczak, Editor-in-Chief

Special Issue on:

Social Innovation in an Interconnected World

Guest Editors

Dr. Ruby P. Lee, Florida State University, USA; Hanken School of Economics, Finland

Dr. Jelena Spanjol, University of Illinois at Chicago, USA

Dr. Sunny Li Sun, University of Missouri-Kansas City, USA

Dr. Bo Zou, Harbin Institute of Technology, China

Submission due date: November 15, 2017

Over the past two decades, social innovations have dramatically changed the landscape of worldwide societal challenges such as social inequality, poverty, pollution, energy provision, unemployment, and healthcare. Defined as a way to offer novel solutions that can more effectively and efficiently solve social problems and needs, social innovations like Microfinance and Fairtrade labels have become the main engine of inclusive growth and social change. In part because the social innovation literature is still fragmented and dispersed among fields, we believe that it is time to revisit existing theories in innovation, entrepreneurship, public policy and other domains to account for various new phenomena relating to social innovation. Given the evolving nature of innovation and the shifting focus of innovation from developed economies to emerging economies, the purpose of this special issue is to address a pressing need to understand social innovation in an interconnected world, specifically its role in emerging economies.

Given the multidisciplinary nature of social innovation and entrepreneurship research, we invite manuscripts that are from various scholarly domains including, but not limited to economics, finance, international business, marketing, organizational behavior, psychology, sociology, and strategy, to name a few. We encourage manuscripts that go across markets and industries, and take a global perspective. We further welcome diversified methods (qualitative or quantitative or mixed), including comparative history analysis and case study to enrich our understanding of social innovation in the interconnected world. 

A Special Issue Conference will be held June 1-3, 2018 and dedicated to the authors whose papers have gone through the first round of review to present their work and receive feedback from the audience. It will be held at Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China. Shidler College of Business at the University of Hawaii, Manoa is sponsoring best paper awards. 

For the full call for papers, suggested topics and research questions, please visit the journal’s website or go to http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/store/10.1111/(ISSN)1540-5885/asset/homepages/special_issue.pdf?v=1&s=d87517a473cac4882b826420fcd9e1c577a58bc8&isAguDoi=false.

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