Evaluating social innovation

In this article the author upholds that evaluation may become itself a factor of innovation: by bringing data to inform and guide ongoing decision making as part of an innovative process; if it is designed to empower people and to improve their programs using a form of self-evaluation and reflection while social action is unfolding; by helping people to reconstruct their experiences finding new meanings to deepen sense of their actions and to understand better what it means to be leaders of an innovative process in the context of welfare programs. To play this role evaluation must have a complex vision both of context in which innovation emerges and of innovation generative and diffusive process.