Empirical approaches in social innovation studies

The idea that social innovations are the vehicles that will drive broader social change processes necessary to cope with societal challenges have spurred considerable amounts of empirical research. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of three empirical approaches to study social innovation and discuss their merits and shortcomings. First) Studying single cases of social innovation provides us with descriptions of the phenomenon in depth on the level of initiatives and projects; second) narratives of change leave behind the single case analysis but follow a more aggregate approach, either in terms of historical studies, sectoral studies, or in terms of practice level analyses; third) beyond qualitative approaches to study SI, more recent attempts have been made to analyse SI quantitatively and derive indicators of SI. The article analyses the three approaches in turn and focus on the kind of insights they deliver, their assumptions, strengths and limitations.