Invention, Adolescence & Absorption: The Urban Social Innovation Process (USIP)

Cities are perhaps the most effective basis for innovation, as urban societies have well-established mechanisms of feedback, amplification, and selection to support creative production from their vast resources of human and intellectual capital. Throughout history, cities have been a natural pool of inventions and ideas. Especially in the case of social innovations, urban societies play a central role. This paper asks: How can inventions that originate from within a society effectively evolve into innovations for the respective society as a user and recipient? The model called USIP ("Urban Social Innovation Process") put forward in this text defines "Social Innovation" from a comprehensively social perspective: it places society as an active player (inventor) already at the beginning of the process, and then introduces "innovation adolescence" and "diffusion" as subsequent key mechanisms. The paper shows central deficits of innovation discourses due to their limitation to economic processes, and how in favour of market absorption, social absorption had been widely neglected. The article concludes with a set of hypotheses how urban social innovation can be empirically investigated in order to derive applications for urban and economic development.