Social Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation in Aging

Social entrepreneurship is usually understood as an economic activity which focuses at social values, goals, and investments that generates surpluses for social entrepreneurs as individuals, groups, and startups who are working for the benefit of communities, instead of strictly focusing mainly at the financial profit, economic values, and the benefit generated for shareholders or owners. Social entrepreneurship combines the production of goods, services, and knowledge in order to achieve both social and economic goals and allow for solidarity building. From a broader perspective, entities that are focused on social entrepreneurship are identified as parts of the social and solidarity economy. These are, for example, social enterprises, cooperatives, mutual organizations, self-help groups, charities, unions, fair trade companies, community enterprises, and time banks.<br><br>Social innovation is a key element of social entrepreneurship. Social innovation is usually understood as new strategies, concepts, products, services, and organizational forms that allow for the satisfaction of needs. Such innovations are created in particular in the contact areas of various sectors of the social system. For example, these are spaces between the public sector, the private sector, and civil society. These innovations not only allow the solving of problems but also extend possibilities for public action.

J. Felix, A. Klimczuk, Social Entrepreneurship and Social Innovation in Aging, [in:] D. Gu, M.E. Dupre (eds.), Encyclopedia of Gerontology andPopulation Aging, Springer, Cham 2020, pp. 1-8, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69892-2_242-1. 4 and aging persons and their families are a response to a long period of the commodification of social services. From the 1970s, the gradual deconstruction of the welfare state at various levels and paces in several countries has introduced the risk that the population aging is becoming another factor of the deepening of social inequality. The policy of fiscal austerity has returned the responsibility of old age almost entirely to older people themselves or to their families, just as before the rise of social security systems in the nineteenth century. Fiscal austerity policy has fostered a contrary interpretation of aging (Phillipson 2015). Older people started to be seen just as a high cost or a burden to the public sector, especially in the fields of the health sector and social security. Gradually, the states started to consider these sectors as costs and rush into delegating responsibilities to the private market or the traditional philanthropy. This is what Debert (1999) calls "reprivatization of old age." At some point, even the gerontological discourse started using notions such as "productive aging" and "positive aging" that could be considered as stimulus and incentives to older and aging persons to take responsibility and manage their own old age. Therefore, the growth of the social and solidarity economy can be considered as another manifestation of the public need to share the responsibility related to aging and care for older people with civil society and the private sector.
The process of sharing of responsibilities has become impossible in the economic environment of the twentieth century, where the state presented needs to force taxes, but taxpayers increasingly refuse to pay more taxes. Contemporarily the social and solidarity economy is disseminated as an alternative route or even as the main route in the case of population aging, due to potentially significant opportunities for innovation in goods, services, spaces, public schemes, and various specific industries. It is easy to notice that this is also a cost-effective way to establish solidarity with those at risk of social exclusion.

Changes in the Service Sector and the Development of Social Innovation in Aging
Social innovation, as Kon (2018) highlights, breaks the economic paradigm that considers the service sector as "passive" and dependent on suppliers and that perceives innovation as feature a exclusive to the industrial sector. This scholar advocates an "integrated" view of production and consumption. With regard to aging, this finding is relevant, since the social entrepreneurship could be considered as a set of services to meet the needs of older people, their family members, and formal caregivers and the specialized care sector or aging services sector.
Thus, the dependence on integration with the operator becomes more intense. A co-production A few warning messages should also be given to potential social entrepreneurs in the field of aging. Firstly, it is crucial to be aware that, in the political environment, social innovation can provoke political reactions, since it shows a failure of the state or the market. This may require considerable negotiation skills, especially with public entities and institutional relations.
Secondly, the social entrepreneur must be concerned with offering diverse solutions rather than just a traditional decommodified solution. Thirdly, because social innovation must be customized or "ad hoc," it will hardly be replicated in time and space, so by definition, it is limited. Scaling up of a proven solution nationally, regionally, or globally thus requires adaptations, specific strategies, and further research. The last warning is to view social innovation as any other innovation from the perspective of the research and development (R&D) investment. Innovation -and social innovation is not an exception -is always dynamic and constitutes a permanent work in progress. It is common to imagine that social innovation arises without the need for research or is the result of the goodness of heart. It is also typical to wrongly imagine that once the enterprise has been implemented, the research can be stopped.
Disregarding any of these warnings can significantly jeopardize social entrepreneurship in aging populations.