Social Innovation, Entrepreneurship And New Green Jobs: Successful Experiences In Mexico

Even before the crisis outbreak in 2008, there was a pressing problem affecting both advanced and emerging economies: unemployment. The financial crisis first and the fiscal crisis later have put even more pressure on this issue, leading on many cases to social discontent.Opportunities in green economy development exist that can offer ways of addressing this problem and provide new solutions. This chapter focuses on identifying successful experiences in Mexico in which social innovation becomes a key element in developing new skills and highly productive alternatives, mainly, in the green sector.By studying social processes of innovation, this research can help understand the ways in which cooperative social innovation among different economic sectors and social groups can be enabled. Following the literature and as a result of case analyses of successful community development experiences, it is possible to identify five key elements that successful practices have in common: First, creativity, as the starting point to generate a new or novel output; second, value, created when an innovation comes as a solution to a problem; third, a collaborative atmosphere, which fosters individual initiative and cross-pollination; the fourth element is individual expectations, including individual initiative and tolerance for mistakes, which encourages individual effort. Finally, networking based on self-organized special interest groups with informal, horizontal structures, objectives and tasks — these groups tend to have formal leadership and small budgets and are driven from the “grassroots” and/or previous community projects.In most cases, there are few financial incentives to endorse social innovation, so individuals and organizations have also developed quite interesting recognition instruments to engage new participants and to guarantee their sustainability.In sum, this work adds to the literature that links social innovation and entrepreneurship, and aims to help build a blueprint towards designing successful development strategies based on this particular type of innovation, by carrying out a systematic compilation and codification of particular cases, in which it has been identified, in Mexico.