Identifying the roles of social innovation and responsible innovation in local transition initiatives: The Case of a third places’ network

This article aims at observing and characterizing the linkages and tensions between the notions of social innovation and responsible innovation. The scientific literature has little confronted them so far, thus we propose to compare them and seek to understand their role in shedding light on the phenomenon of socio-economic transition. We illustrate this questioning by the unique case study of a rural network of third places in the south of France and by a processual analysis, which reveals two sequences, each marked by a specific paradigm of innovation. While our results underline the participation of social innovation in the democratization of alternative territorial development, they also point out that the paradigm of responsible innovation introduces a possible risk of depoliticization of the issues related to socio-economic transition.
JEL Codes: L31, 035