D3.5 Social entrepreneurship, public-private networks & social innovation v2.0

This report is organized in two parts. First, it reviews the existing academic and non -academic literature about public libraries involvement into public-private networks aiming to foster social innovations and social entrepreneurship. The purpose of the report is to establish a series of criteria to be used in selecting empirical cases to investigate later-on.

The document reports that public libraries’ core missions have changed through time, from the curation of books to the building of communities. Not all libraries can be called community builders, but overall there seems to be a general tendency in which traditional operations of preservation and circulation of collections are progressively replaced by new operations aiming at connecting people and at generating social interactions.


The old and the new missions are actually more related than one may think at first, because they are both part of the knowledge creation process. For its part, the curatorial library plays a supportive role in this process by providing the agents with an access to codified knowledge. In comparison, a community builder is a more central player, because it fosters the exchange of potentially informal knowledge. In this sense, it can be the initiator of a knowledge creation cycle.

Public libraries should thus be thought as agents specialized in innovations that change the interaction patterns within the society. As a side outcome, this literature review clarifies the concept of social innovation. It encompasses innovations that modify interaction patterns among individuals, be they located within a company, a neighborhood or a larger area. Interaction can be the method used to innovate and it is also the result of the innovation. Our take is that pursuing inclusion or aiming at improving people's well-being shall not be used as the only defining criterion.

Defined as such, social innovations seem of primary importance for democratic societies, because there are social and technological forces that produce social disintegration. For instance, the development of suburban life, or the promotion of taylor-made experiences, like the one provided by online recommender systems, are reducing occasions to build shared experiences with others – which reduces the communication channels between people. Community building libraries appear as a
potential answer to this phenomenon.

Many surveys identify a disaffection of the general public for libraries, but their role as prime social innovators makes them essential for social cohesion. The empirical case studies will certainly illustrate this point. From all that has been said, the selected cases shall involve:

1) Innovations that generate discussion networks among individuals. These networks may be largely invisible at first sight, and their study will require further investigations, like the conduct of interviews.
2) In this sense, researchers should be attentive to the “outcome network”: how many actors have been reached out? Is the network ephemerous or self-sustained? what is the long term effect of such network on the actors involved?
3) The public libraries can be the initiator or a supportive agent. Further, the input network might involve a variety of public and private actors.

In a second part, the report summarizes a series of 11 in-depth case studies carried out across Europe to investigate the hypothesis of public libraries as social innovators. All of these cases mobilize a set of semi-structured interviews with actors of the innovations, selected according to their importance and/or representativeness. Finally, section 4 provides with first elements of conclusion. In particular, it appears that public libraries are not only favoring the transmission of codified knowledge through the circulation of books, but they also improve social cohesion and they permit the transmission of know-how.