Co-creating a Social Innovation Research Agenda for Europe.

As part of the Social Innovation Europe initiative, EMES was asked to produce a research agenda on social innovation (SI). To date, SI practice has been ahead of theory, but research has been catching up in recent years, partly owing to increased interest (and investment) from research funding bodies. It is widely acknowledged that SI research and practice need to be better linked through a mutual recognition of their different purposes in contemporary society. Thus, our goal is to give researchers the opportunity to co-create a future research agenda in collaboration with other stakeholders. Instead of taking the easy way to do this (simply doing an updated literature review and listing a number of topics that we believe to be relevant to SI research), EMES decided to embark in a co-creation process inviting academic stakeholders across Europe. It was an experiment that had never been tried before with such meagre resources but it was an intense learning exercise whose result is included here. Essentially, the SIE research agenda aims at building a community that shares the purpose to identify approaches to study SI free from instrumental objectives. Research approaches represent different perspectives on how SI can be studied: as an aspect of an evaluation process, a policy area, an organisation, a technological trend. In order to reach this objective we identify a selective number of topics and actions, covering different types of topics based on past and future consultations, which are by no means exhaustive: stages in a process, policy fields, communities etc. We then use these to highlight possible approaches to study or further the study of SI - where we stand with research on these topics and what is necessary.