ABSTRACT
Social innovation is in fashion. It is praised as the solution to state as well as market failures and politicians dream of social innovation as a vehicle to create more efficient social services—to do more for less. This chapter is a theoretical investigation of social innovation that seeks to challenge the simplistic notion of social innovation as an improvement machine. It expresses that the disturbance of order can be viewed as a key feature of social innovations. The chapter focuses on pro-innovation bias. This bias is the tendency to focus only on the positive aspects of innovation, forgetting its limitations or weaknesses. The chapter outlines some of the methodological implications of understanding social innovation as a heretical endeavor. The popularity of the concept of social innovation seems to be ever growing. Social value is dependent on the situation, context, period in history and perspective.
