Socio-Tech Innovation, 1st ed. 2020 Harnessing Technology for Social Good

This book defines socio-technological innovation and lays out different aspects of technology innovation and adoption literature as applied to socio-tech innovation and entrepreneurship. Socio-tech innovation refers to novel solutions that involve development or adoption of technological innovations to address social and/or environmental problems with a view towards creating benefit for the larger whole rather than just for the owners or investors. Unlike conventional technological innovation, socio-tech innovation either develops a product specifically for underserved markets and adopts a model in which the market is not an afterthought but the rai-son d?etre. Social ventures have not been as successful in scaling up, though technology innovation-led ventures have; therefore, meaningful actionable insights that can help social ventures scale up successfully can be gleaned by this process. This book offers researchers in innovation and entrepreneurship programs a uniqueand interdisciplinary approach to studying social innovation that is grounded in technology innovation. This book features a series of socio-tech venture cases that illustrate these dynamics and can be used in undergraduate and graduate courses.

Chapter 1: Introduction: Socio-Tech Venturing: Theoretical Lens of Key Areas of Complexities.- Chapter 2: Harnessing Power at the Edges: A case of MBISSA from Africa.- Chapter 3: How Technology led to the empowerment of women lenders and borrowers.- Chapter 4: Vanishing Blue-gold: Intelligent Value based Market Segment for its customers: Clensta International.- Chapter 5: The Elusive Model of Technology, Media, Social Development, and Financial Sustainability.- Chapter 6: Napify: A case of social innovation and market value capture.- Chapter 7: Technology and Tenacity in Rural India.- Chapter 8: Saving Little Lives through Bempu TempWatch.- Chapter 9: AgriApp: Enabling social change through technology.- Chapter 10: Lifting the Lid off the Toilet- Understanding the Indian Context and A Case on Samagra Empowerment Foundation.- Chapter 11: Farmers’ Producer Organization (FPO) of Kaushalya Foundation: Enabling social inclusion of women through technology.- Chapter 12: Go Coop: Leveraging Technology to Impact the Lives of the Rural Poor.- Chapter 13: Building entrepreneurial community: A collaborative benefit corporation for women empowering women.- Chapter 14: Kindling change: A case for sustainable development work.- Chapter 15: CropIn: Addressing farmer Poverty through ‘connected’ farming.- Chapter 16: Conclusion: Socio-tech Enterprises, Actors and Dynamics of Innovation Development and Implementation.

Introduces a conceptual framework to define, understand and study socio-tech innovation and entrepreneurship Provides case studies about social ventures that use technology as a core or enabling factor to solve social and environmental problems with the benefits accruing to the larger society Presents disruptive socio-tech organizing models that are different from those of traditional tech ventures and/or traditional nonprofits