Introduction

This chapter zooms in on the processes of developing and using different types of knowledge to value, upscale and diffuse social innovation (SI) in the field of poverty and social exclusion. This interest can be motivated by the wish of practitioners or academics to take stock and learn from a broad range of projects or by the policy ambition to upscale or diffuse ‘best practices’ to other contexts and develop ‘evidence-based policies’ in order to increase social impact. However, coming to a clear stock of knowledge with regard to SI's social impact and potential for social change is particularly challenging. Identifying and transferring ‘best practices’, for instance, is fraught with difficulties. Socially innovative projects are difficult to assess and compare in unequivocal terms because they have multiple goals, which are often hard to quantify and are tied up with specific local conditions and contingencies. Crucial elements of what makes a social innovation a success in one city or country may not be transferable at all (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000; Evers et al, 2014). Policy makers and practitioners often struggle with questions about which type of knowledge is needed to change their policies and practices for the better. Do they need more objective evidence and numbers about social impact or should they attribute more attention to context-specific experiences and stories of the people involved to gain a deeper understanding of the social problems and how they can be solved in particular cases? If the answer is ‘both’, what constitutes a good balance between these approaches and how could it be achieved?

The issue of knowledge for SI only recently became a topic of interest (see Antadze and Westley, 2012; Marée and Mertens, 2012; Moulaert and Van Dyck, 2013; Novy et al, 2013; Stigendal and Alwall, 2015; Phillips et al, 2015). Most contributions focus on specific concerns like impact measurement, the ontological and epistemological foundations of SI research, the state of SI literature in the field of social entrepreneurship or bridging academic and practitioner knowledge in practice.