The United Nations Agenda 2030 has recognized that Social Economy (SE) entities play an important role in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). In order to maximize the impact of the SE, governments have recently deployed new policies regarding these entities. The objective is to understand the context of policy change that has allowed these policies to emerge, their main characteristics and the critical factors in their construction and implementation. Successful policy cases in Europe and Spain have been studied. Qualitative data have been collected through key policy documents, experts, and focus groups. As a main finding, the study shows that this new model of policies exhibits the following features: it focuses on transformative change, follows the public-community partnership governance approach and the mainstream approach in the sense of a broader policy context, and finally, it is innovative in terms of means and of complex systematization of strategies. Difficulties in the implementation of the partnership approach, in the deployment of the policy-mainstreaming approach, and in the acceptance of the SE framed by all policymakers, SE representatives, and government staff, and constraints in financial endowment are the main critical factors in the implementation of these policies.

The aim of this paper is to illustrate how social innovation is promoted and spread by cooperative clusters in order to develop regional change. This paper focuses on the main drivers of the spreading and exaptation processes of social innovation. The cooperative cluster model, the exaptation concept, the top-down approach, the meso-institutions concept and the meso-level perspective are used to capture the strategic approach of spreading social innovation. The study analyses two successful clusters: Mondragon, made up of industrial SMEs, and Anecoop, an agricultural cooperative group, both leading clusters in their respective region. Qualitative methodology is used to compare both case studies. Among the findings, this paper is one of the first attempts to explain the territorial institutionalisation of social innovations by way of their exaptation. It presents adaptation and exaptation as distinct but partly sequential processes: the adaptation of social innovations in cooperative clusters paves the way for the subsequent leap via exaptation of these innovations in the whole of the territory.

This article explores the capacity of industrial ecology to generate sustainable development in Latin America’s agro-industrial clusters. An evolutionary analytical approach is outlined, which is used to study Veracruz’s (Mexico) sugarcane cluster through a qualitative methodology. Our goal is to show that social innovation is key to promoting the sustainable development of clusters characterized by fragmented social, power, and innovation networks. Accordingly, innovations in the realm of industrial ecology often have a dual impact. On the one hand, in the dominant network, industrial ecology is reduced to its technological dimensions within a political-economic framework constrained by its external insertion and the maintenance of power dynamics. On the other hand, industrial ecology is a vehicle for a kind of Schumpeterian entrepreneurship driven by the core values of trust, transparency, acknowledgement of other people’s capabilities, and non-discrimination. This new transformative network promotes true socio-technical change by enhancing local resources and involving other intermediate actors. It also creates a localized agro-food system that promotes the development of cluster-based dynamics in the territory through radical innovations in industrial ecology. The article presents a new way of inserting industrial ecology into the dynamics of cluster-based organizations.

Most of SMEs are engaged in open innovation practices, but they do not benefit from open innovation or from patenting in the same way as larger firms do. At the same time SMEs, as territorialized suppliers, play a crucial role within evolving regional specialization. In this context the purpose of our study is to examine how low and medium technology supplier SMEs learn and organize themselves at a territorial level to address the challenge of IP protection in an open innovation paradigm. We used a qualitative method with a longitudinal multi-case study involving 27 companies with a historical lance to compare the territorial dynamics of knowledge protection within clustered supplier SMEs in two European regions. The results show they protect their knowledge by learning how to design, in a direct relationship with clients, customized complex technological products to develop a new organizational matrix of multidisciplinary knowledge that reveals itself difficult to imitate within the clusters. They also cope with other supplier firms across sectors even if they show societal path dependencies in the way to build cooperation. This dynamic has given birth to changing structural relationships among regionally clustered SMEs and between them and large firms.

La literatura evolucionista sobre innovación tecnológica se ha desarrollado bastante independientemente de la investigación sobre innovación social. El presente artículo intentará evidenciar que en los clústeres de América Latina la innovación social constituye una precondición para poner en valor los conocimientos locales. Este reconocimiento permite enfrentar la tensión dialéctica fragmentación/integración del conocimiento existente en estos clústeres. Se esboza un marco teórico evolucionista en el que la innovación social, y en especial los nuevos valores, constituyen el vehículo de la entrada en escena de los motores de la transformación sectorial y territorial en los clústeres agroindustriales: nuevos actores, nuevas competencias y nuevas relaciones. Con este marco conceptual, se analiza la dinámica del clúster de la caña de azúcar sobre la base de una metodología cualitativa basada esencialmente en la realización de entrevistas en profundidad.La producción de caña de azúcar es el motor económico de la región del centro de Veracruz (México). Pero la fuerte integración vertical del sector y la fragmentación del conocimiento en el clúster azucarero han contribuido a la rápida descomposición social de la región y a la acentuación de la violencia y la exclusión social. En este contexto, se mostrará el papel de los valores de la economía social en la renovación de las actividades y en la reorganización local de la cadena de valor con una orientación hacia un desarrollo más sostenible. Todo ello, de la mano de la irrupción de nuevas empresas (PYMES) portadoras de nuevas visiones, planteamientos y competencias que desafían las posiciones establecidas.