Abstract:
“Since creation of new economic order in the form of new firms is what entrepreneurs do, complexity science makes much more sense as the preferred kind of science for entrepreneurial research” (McKelvey, 2004: 314). This article considers the application of complexity science to a particular type of entrepreneurial research: social entrepreneurship. We explore Hector’s World, a social venture whose purpose is to educate “digital tots” about digital citizenship. We begin by briefly outlining Hector’s World Ltd which then acts as a contextual backdrop for exploring the complexity model of social innovation (Goldstein, Hazy & Silberstang, 2009, 2010) and the concepts of attractors, self organization and emergence. Emergence is then considered from a Schumpeterian inspired perspective as the combining and recombining of various resources. We suggest that within Hector’s World “digital citizenship” emerged as an attractor through a bifurcation process and argue that the key to its successful emergence centers on the combination and recombination of resources and the interactions of various systems within the social networks of Hector’s World. Of particular interest is the impact these interactions have on the key parameters and attractor bifurcation within this system as innovation and change emerges. We suggest that exploring and applying complexity thinking, specifically a social innovation perspective, to social innovation within Hector’s World can usefully contribute to an emergence-based theory of social innovation.