Social Innovation Revisited

-by Professor Luk N. Van Wassenhove, 23 August 2010-

About four years ago, our new dean asked me to set up a research centre bringing together all existing initiatives related to the role of business in society. The man had a clear vision: sustainable enterprise would become an important trend in the years ahead.

In response to the dean’s request, I set about amalgamating a number of more or less successful initiatives: our Health Management Initiative, the Sustainability Group (energy, environment, sustainable mobility, etc.), the Social Entrepreneurship Initiative, the Corporate Social Responsibility and Ethics Group, as well as my own Humanitarian Research Group. To this was added a new Africa Initiative, which aimed to devote more attention to the needs of the Dark Continent. While being quite a mixture of disparate themes and objectives, it was also a golden opportunity to move beyond the stereotyped pigeonholing of such initiatives and to look more comprehensively at complex, multidisciplinary problems with a group of highly motivated colleagues. Read the rest of this article...