Sfs was well represented at the 17th ISIRC in Calgary

The 17th ISIRC (International Social Innovation Research Conference) took place this year from 3rd to 5th September in Calgary, Canada, and was organised by the University of Calgary. The ISIRC is one of the leading international annual scientific conferences in the field of social innovation research. This year, 160 researchers from a variety of different countries attended the conference in Calgary.

In his opening keynote, Jürgen Howaldt, Director of the Social Research Centre at TU Dortmund University, traced the development of the social innovation research field and painted a picture of potential future challenges. He focused in particular on the increasing role of the poly-crisis and, against this background, described the contribution of social innovations to societal transformation processes. The other keynote speeches at the conference discussed different key topics in the research field. Katherine McGowan (Mount Royal University, Calgary) addressed the challenges of social innovation in the development of a systemic pedagogy, Rafael Ziegler (HEC Montreal) described the importance of cooperatives in the development of a circular economy, and Filipe Almeida (Portugal Social Innovation) focused his closing keynote on the development of the successful Portuguese programme for supporting and funding social innovations.

The three-day conference, with 13 streams, took place on the spacious campus of the University of Calgary. The sfs team, including Katrin Bauer, Jürgen Howaldt, Karina Maldonado-Mariscal, and Marthe Zirngiebl , was well represented in Calgary. Three streams were organised and moderated with the participation of sfs researchers: Marthe Zirngiebl was responsible for the stream ‘Social Innovation Ecosystems,’ which she had set up together with Christoph Kaletka, Karina Maldonado-Mariscal in cooperation with Rafael Ziegler (HEC Montreal) led the stream ‘Social Innovation and Circular Economy’, and Katrin Bauer organised the stream ‘Organisational Hybridity.’ With four paper presentations, the sfs team provided new insights in various topics and streams. Marthe Zirngiebl and Katrin Bauer presented a study on social innovation at German higher education institutions, which was conducted as part of the BMFTR-funded project ‘Platform for Social Innovation and Social Enterprises.’ Karina Maldonado-Mariscal highlighted various aspects of exnovation, and Katrin Bauer presented a research design for measuring the social innovation capacity of ‘public entrepreneurs.’