How to grow social innovation from the view of organizational scaling and diffusion: Cases of eco-tourism communities in Taiwan

This research aims to explore about how to grow social innovation from the view of organizational scaling and diffusion. With the emergence of innovation approach for solving the social issues, the concept of “scaling up” is increasingly the dominant framing for how success is understood in the field of social innovation. For many in the social sector, scale is a typical challenge instead of business sector. It may be also much more important than the early creation or prototyping of a good social innovation. However, scaling-up approach is not the only way of framing discussions about the growth of social innovations. There is also an extensive literature on innovation studies that conceptualize the growth of innovations in terms of diffusion. With this perspective, this research aims to develop a social innovation model for regenerating the eco-tourism based community in Taiwan from the perspective of innovation diffusion, and explore the key factors and development mechanism from social innovation creation to diffusion. Our case study findings propose a three-phase mechanism in the transitional period from social innovation creation to diffusion. The first deepening phase means that the social innovators need to provide the tools and platform for citizen empowerment and engagement. These visible solutions and tools are proposed to enhance citizens' capacity to act on the place they inhabit. Secondly, the upscaling phase involves the interaction of many stakeholders and brings together different industries to build up shared visions. Finally, social innovators can increase and diffuse the viability of solution to inspire emulation in the third outreaching phase.