Regional Institutional Arenas for Social Innovation: a mixed methods research

Social innovation is conceptualized as having two intimately related pillars: institutional innovation and locally embedded innovation, in the sense of social economy. Two main research questions were addressed: how political, institutional innovation is fostered and how does it influence social economy? A mixed methods research was conducted in the Mühlviertel NUTS3 region. Despite a framework of enhanced autonomy and institutional innovation for the main stakeholders, both macro and micro analysis illustrate a lack of intermediate space to: a) link the innovative agenda to high-state political agendas, and b) link institutional innovation to social economy.This is an original preprint of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Social Entrepreneurship on [date of publication], available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/[ https://doi.org/10.1080/19420676.2019.1705378