Social Innovation and Sustainable Development Goals: Social Enterprises and the Role of the Supply Chain in Creating Dual Value

Dear Colleagues,

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) agenda presents a key action to promoting sustainable development in practice. The adoption of a wide set of common and measurable goals assumes the stakeholders’ cooperation and focus on specific targets. With the highly ambitious 2030 deadline approaching, the whole plan requires that countries, regions and localities mobilize all their resources towards transforming their societal, economic, physical and institutional environments to meet the SDGs. In that context, specific initiatives are required for societies to re-organize the way resources are used, priorities are set and actions are designed and implemented. Social innovation as emerging from a locality, region, and/or country aligns with the global sustainability goals. This Special Issue focuses on social purpose enterprises and their respective supply chains as a unique tool to achieving SDGs. Social enterprises (SEs) engage with innovations that serve unmet social needs through the adoption of context-specific ideas that unblock capabilities such as the power to cooperate for common purpose goals, the empowerment of localities and groups of people, and the transformation of local institutions. Nevertheless, in many cases, achieving self-sustenance requires an equal emphasis on creating economic value. The creation of dual value, encompassing both social and economic aspects, becomes an essential requirement for ensuring the long-term viability of a social enterprise. The performance of the supply chain plays a crucial role in enabling a social enterprise to deliver dual value. The scope of this SI is broad and involves both the analysis and the design of all types of activities related to the 17 integrated SDGs (e.g., poverty, health, inequality, etc.) and the assessment of progress in their achievement through operation research-based techniques, such as optimization, multicriteria and multi-objective methods among others. These techniques can offer systematic methodologies that are able to combine the conflicting objectives arising from SDGs and can provide a rational compromise solution to complex decision-making issues.  Thus, their contribution in the use of measuring progress in the achievement of SDGs is indispensable. The purpose of this Special Issue is to enrich our impact assessment ability with respect to initiatives that are promoted under various SDGs plans. Efficacy in the selection of projects to be financed and implemented using local, regional, national and supranational resources (physical, human, and financial capital) is mandatory if societies are to meet the 2030 SDGs deadline with comparative success. The ability of operation research-based techniques to assist us with the measurement of the actual impact that social enterprises have on the achievement of targets related to the SDGs and the creation of dual value has not been extensively analysed to date. In that respect, the current Special Issue will supplement the existing knowledge by illustrating the importance of applying such techniques as a key method to assess the ability of SEs in achieving SDGs and dual value.

Dr. Irene Daskalopoulou
Dr. Athanasia Karakitsiou
Guest Editors

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• sustainability
• SDGs (poverty, hunger, health and well-being, education, equality, etc.)
• social innovation
• social enterprises
• dual value
• operation research
• optimization
• multicriteria
• supply chain