Socio-Tech Innovation

Book excerpt: This book defines socio-technological innovation and lays out different aspects of technology innovation and adoption literature as applied to socio-tech innovation and entrepreneurship. Socio-tech innovation refers to novel solutions that involve development or adoption of technological innovations to address social and/or environmental problems with a view towards creating benefit for the larger whole rather than just for the owners or investors. Unlike conventional technological innovation, socio-tech innovation either develops a product specifically for underserved markets and adopts a model in which the market is not an afterthought but the rai-son d’etre. Social ventures have not been as successful in scaling up, though technology innovation-led ventures have; therefore, meaningful actionable insights that can help social ventures scale up successfully can be gleaned by this process. This book offers researchers in innovation and entrepreneurship programs a unique and interdisciplinary approach to studying social innovation that is grounded in technology innovation. This book features a series of socio-tech venture cases that illustrate these dynamics and can be used in undergraduate and graduate courses.