Alternative insights for social innovation policy: A study of community-based innovative projects in the context of social service in Hong Kong

Social innovation (SI) has been the emphasis of the Hong Kong SAR government ever since its neoliberalist change in social welfare policy in the 2000s. Under the social service sector reform context, SI has generally been seen as new solutions that involve new products, services, or practices to address new social problems. The policy emphasis in SI for the SAR government is the development of social entrepreneurship and cross-sectoral collaboration to create social impact through such innovative initiatives. The government mainly provides seed money or scale-up funding to encourage the involvement of social entrepreneurs from different sectors, including businesses and other professionals and aims to enhance the economic efficiency of the social service sector. However, the maximalist perspective of SI that emphasises enhancing the welfare of disadvantaged groups and their capacities for better use of assets and resources has received less attention and is underexplored in such a context.

This paper explores the influential factors affecting the development of SI initiatives in the context of social service in Hong Kong. The data was from nineteen community-based innovative projects conducted by the NGOs, which joined the “NGO Innovation Hub” (NIH) programme, funded by The Hongkong and Shanghai Banking Corporation Limited (HSBC). The research process involved a qualitative design, including participant observation of researchers of the participated projects, qualitative interviews of the workers, and secondary data analysis of the related documents and reports. The findings highlighted the proactive nature and importance of innovative small-scale projects and their experiments and the significance of different community development approaches in providing critical support to relevant target service users and fostering collective actions for community improvement. The resultant findings testify to the significance of replicable small-scale innovative projects in facilitating SI practices as a viable alternative to social entrepreneurship emphasised in the SI policy of Hong Kong. It contributes to the social innovation literature and provides insights for SI policy to practitioners and policymakers in Hong Kong and other East Asian countries with similar entrepreneurial emphasis.