Page 14 - Moč in vloga družbenih inovacij

With the development of humanistic and social
When social and technological innovation have
gone hand in hand, the formula for the further
development of people and civilisations has al-
ways been more successful than when relying
on one of them alone. The more technologically
sophisticated innovations become, the more they
provide possibilities and opportunities for their
use to the human species – for good and for bad,
both for humans and for the natural environment
in which they are used. This is true to this day.
Attitudes towards innovation are therefore not
necessarily positive, as they can result in pro-
gress, but together with humans’ natural instinct
to survive through the exercise of power, they can
also do more harm than good. In this respect, for
example, ancient thinkers in antiquity and up to
the late Middle Ages warned against innovation
as something bad, undesirable, even blasphe-
mous and toxic, as it introduced disorder, fear,
domination, and a departure from the predicta-
ble, the familiar and the stable into the existing
order (Ayob et al., 2016). This was especially true
for social innovations, which until the end of the
18th century were still primarily associated with
revolutionary changes in existing conditions, sit-
uations, and arrangements in society and in the
governance of states, either by force or in the rev- or final stages of any social process:
olutionary seizure of power. Similarly, in a nega-
tive sense, many modern innovations, while suc-
cessfully proven to solve some of the problems of
civilisation, have at the same time created many
new, often even greater and more fatal problems,
as is the case, for example, with the invention of
dynamite, nuclear energy, right up to the current
boom in artificial intelligence.
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science perspectives on social innovation, which
first emerged at the end of the 19th century, and
then finally gained intensity and a positive con-
notation only after the Second World War, in-
novation also received the necessary attention
from the perspective of society, culture, economy,
governance and, last but not least, politics. After
this period, and especially in the current era, in
which a series of diverse civilisational changes
with a high degree of criticality are taking place,
the discourse on social innovation is not only a
matter of professional-scientific debate, but also
of everyday political action. In both worlds, so-
cial innovation is seen as a positive phenomenon
or an opportunity to change for the better. The
close connection in today’s relationship between
theories and everyday action is also reflect-
ed in the definition of social innovation as ‘the
development and implementation of new ideas
– in the form of products, services and/or mod-
els – to meet societal needs and to create new
social relationships or collaborations in order to
improve and empower living conditions’ (Europe-
an Commission, 2013; (Mulgan et al., 2007; Jing
& Gong, 2012; Godin, 2016; Phillips et al., 2024;
Solis-Navarrete et al., 2021, 2025).
It can be said that today the focus of social inno-
vation revolves around the following three core
themes of ‘novelty’ and ‘originality’, which emerge
at the very beginnings, intermediate points, and/
1. new contributions to solving societal problems
(input phase);
2. new processes of institutional work and social
participation (process phase);
3. new long-term effects on the values of wider
social equality and well-being (impact phase).