Teaching Social Innovation Through Place-based Learning: Facilitating Perspective Sharing in Co-creating Social Value

Social innovation education has grown in popularity as one of the ways that higher education institutions have a positive impact on wider society. Teaching social innovation often involves engaging with community-based organizations. While addressing real-world problems is widely viewed to be desirable for the organizations, the communities served, and the learners, what is less clear is precisely how engagement is transformed into value. We conducted six annual cycles of action learning using our own MBA teaching to analyze 82 projects where teams of students engaged with socially innovative organizations to address a particular challenge. In the initial action learning cycles, we identified core dichotomies: insider versus outsider perspectives to the social/institutional context, and problem-solving versus analytic modalities for addressing organizational challenges. Through further cycle iterations, we learned that these hybrid tensions between different contexts and modalities contributed to the co-creation of shared social value when facilitated by the educators, who were insiders in both the academic and practitioner contexts. This contextualized understanding of different perspectives in problem-solving and research analysis that co-exist in tension contributes to further developing the concepts of shared social value and place-based learning, and their significance in social innovation education.