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 detre. 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.
Chapter 1: Introduction: Socio-Tech Venturing: Theoretical Lens of Key
Areas of Complexities.
Chapter 2: Harnessing Power at the Edges: A case of
MBISSA from Africa.
Chapter 3: How Technology led to the empowerment of
women lenders and borrowers.
Chapter 4: Vanishing Blue-gold: Intelligent
Value based Market Segment for its customers: Clensta International.
Chapter
5: The Elusive Model of Technology, Media, Social Development, and Financial
Sustainability.
Chapter 6: Napify: A case of social innovation and market
value capture.
Chapter 7: Technology and Tenacity in Rural India.
Chapter
8: Saving Little Lives through Bempu TempWatch.
Chapter 9: AgriApp: Enabling
social change through technology.
Chapter 10: Lifting the Lid off the
Toilet- Understanding the Indian Context and A Case on Samagra Empowerment
Foundation.
Chapter 11: Farmers Producer Organization (FPO) of Kaushalya
Foundation: Enabling social inclusion of women through technology.
Chapter
12: Go Coop: Leveraging Technology to Impact the Lives of the Rural Poor.-
Chapter 13: Building entrepreneurial community: A collaborative benefit
corporation for women empowering women.
Chapter 14: Kindling change: A case
for sustainable development work.
Chapter 15: CropIn: Addressing farmer
Poverty through connected farming.
Chapter 16: Conclusion: Socio-tech
Enterprises, Actors and Dynamics of Innovation Development and Implementation.
Latha Poonamallee is Associate Professor and Chair of Management & Social Innovation at The New School, USA. Joanne Scillitoe is the inaugural Paul Jennings Chair in Entrepreneurship and a Professor of Management at California State, Northridge, USA. Simy Joy is a Research Fellow at the Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode, India.
