Social Open Innovation: Using stakeholder engagement to link Open Innovation with Social Needs

Usually, studies on social innovation focus on the ONGs and on the non-profit organizations as it is part of their main function. Still little is known on how, and why, the various society actors interact in order to develop their social innovations and how companies may drive these processes to be viable on the three pillars of sustainability. In this paper we want to focus on these topics, and how they have been studied, from an open innovation and stakeholder management perspective. We look at the “open” side of the social innovation in order to comprehend how the various societal actors are engaged in these processes and we propose some ideas to further develop the research in this topic.