Founded in Quebec in 1986, the Centre de recherche sur les innovations sociales (CRISES) was a pioneer in research on social innovation and has become the principal French-language SI research centre internationally. Its current scientific program studies the contribution of
social innovations to social and environmental justice in four areas: social policies and practices; territories and living environments; social and collective organizations; and work and employment.
The strength of a diverse, broad-based collaboration
A strategic cluster of the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Société et Culture, CRISES is determinately interdisciplinary, bringing together more than a hundred research members and as many students from eleven Quebec universities, with specialists in political science, industrial relations, sociology, management, environmental studies, economics, geography, social work, women’s studies, urban studies and more.
A driving belief in social innovation
For CRISES, the qualifier “social” refers less to a sector or concern (with the economy or the environment) than to the transformation of social relations. Social innovation (SI) is a collective process, involving both cooperation and conflict, passing through various phases from
experimentation to scaling up, and embracing appropriations with sometimes surprising effects. Experimentation can occur at both the organizational and the institutional level.
SI is therefore much more than a novel response to social problems, an accompaniment to technological innovation in its social effects, or a virtuous creation of individual entrepreneurs; it aims to transform society in depth in order to face challenges such as an aging population, the ecological transition, and the changing face of work.
Research rooted in communities
At the forefront of partnership research and committed to practice settings, CRISES has contributed to the establishment of several central components of Quebec’s IS ecosystem. Examples include the Alliance de recherche universités-communautés en économie sociale (University Community Research Alliance in the Social Economy), Territoires innovants en économie sociale et solidaire (Innovative Territories in the Social and Solidarity Economy) and the Réseau québécois en innovation sociale (Quebec Network in Social Innovation). Today, it is pursuing this approach of the co-construction of knowledge with projects in rural communities — the Ateliers des savoirs partagés (Shared Knowledge Workshops) — or in Montreal North with the Incubateur universitaire de Parole d’excluEs (University Incubator for Parole d’excluEs) — because it is also by promoting research beyond the university walls that CRISES contributes to the co-production of social innovations.
