Exploring the concept of social innovation using Official Statistics

The concept of social innovation is linked to a new way of producing goods and services able to enhance the quality of life by developing new processes of integration in the labour market, creating new relations, meeting new needs (Mulgan, 2007). Moreover, the relevance of social innovation grows in the local development models as factor of change of territorial context (Moulaert et al., 2017). The agents of this process are different: public institutions, enterprises, nonprofit institutions. Within the Istat Research Project “The nonprofit sector as factor of local development and social innovation”, the concept of social innovation has been decomposed into its main dimensions in order to identify specific indicators able to describe the socioeconomic actor’s initiatives and to explore their role in the regional development. The Research Project applied a methodology based on the following steps: study of literature; breakdown of social innovation concept and definition of the dimensions to study; identification of indicators and the best territorial scale according to the research aim and to available data. A multivariate analysis was performed on data collected by Istat surveys on socio-economic units. In particular, the data sources were: Permanent Census of NPI, Permanent Census of Enterprises, Permanent Census of Public Institutions, Survey on Research and Development in enterprises and Community Innovation Survey (CIS). The paper describes the main results about the different steps of analysis, from the operational definition of the concept to the multidimensional analysis performed in order to explore the possibility of studying the social innovation by applying official statistics in territorial analysis.