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Research leaders in Social Innovation head to York

Research leaders in Social Innovation head to York

Posted on 23 July 2015

The York Management School is to host the 7th International Social Innovation Research Conference on the 6-8 September 2015.

Professor Bob Doherty at a village in Ghana using a well funded by the Fairtrade premium.

The open conference in the Ron Cooke Hub brings together established and emerging scholars and leading practioners from around the world to discuss the role of innovation in social movements, not-for-profit organisations, state actors and the broader social economy. The conference, which will have over 200 delegates, has secured a range of influential academic thinkers to present key note lectures.

Professor Bob Doherty, Deputy Dean of the York Management School and this year’s conference chair, said: “We are honoured at York to host an event that brings together a community of researchers that continues to grow and thrive. When the first ISIRC conference took place seven years ago Social Innovation was an emerging concept and we were very excited to contribute to the emergence of such an important field.

“As scholars we felt not only a sense of urgency to understand this phenomenon emerging across countries and cultures but also a deep interest in these new research avenues. The sense of urgency we felt has been deepened by a number of challenges including; increasing gap between rich and poor, reductions in national social welfare budgets, food poverty, climate change and significant demographic changes.”

The conference has over 80 papers with new research tracks on Economic underpinnings of Social Innovation (chaired by Professor Alex Nicholls, Said Business School), Growing and Scaling Social Innovation (Professor Fergus Lyon, Middlesex University), Food Poverty (chaired by Professor Alex Murdock, London South Bank University) and Social Investment (chaired by Mariarosa Scarlata, University of Surrey).

Keynote speakers include eminent entrepreneurship scholar Professor Tom Lumpkin from Syracuse University in the USA, Professor Jacques Defourny from the University of Liege and author of the Emergence of Social Enterprise in Europe together with Carlos Borzago of the University of Trento and Dr Helen Haugh of Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. The Joseph Rowntree Foundation in York has also sponsored a number of practitioner places to the conference.

Anyone wishing to attend the conference can register at isircconference2015.com. It is £300 to attend the whole conference or there is a day rate of £100.

Professor Doherty added: “This is a great opportunity to not only network with key academic thinkers in this area but also to discuss emerging and unique research in social innovation.”

For more details contact Madeline Powell on mo518@york.ac.uk or telephone 07809471633

Further information:

The York Management School is the second largest department at the University of York with over 1,000 students. The School is a socially progressive school of management and business study, so continuing the 1963 founding principles of the University of York which are excellence, equality and opportunity for all. The School runs teaching programmes at undergraduate, postgraduate and doctoral level. There are undergraduate degrees in; Accounting, Business Finance and Management and in Management. The Masters Programme has taught degrees in Accounting and Financial Management, Management, Management with Business Finance, Global Marketing, Human Resource Management, and International Business and Strategy. There are also plans to launch a new BSc Actuarial Science and BSc Marketing in 2016. Joint Masters degrees are also run with the university's departments of Sociology, Politics and Environment.