How to transform “social value” into meaningful products? ——A multiple-case study of leading innovative enterprises

The social impacts of enterprises’ innovation activities have become a novel frontier of innovation management research in recent years. This paper aims to investigate the dynamic process and key mechanisms of how firms transform “Social Value” into competitive products through a meaningful innovation process. Under the “variance-designed” setting of the holistic multiple-case approach, six representative innovation enterprises with controllable variance are selected to be analyzed for theoretical sampling. By intra/inter-case analysis, we figured out two main findings. First, the meaningful innovation process that transforms social value into competitive outputs involves three main sub-processes, namely meaning identification, meaning conversion, and meaning application. Second, the overall process is driven by two key mechanisms, termed the deductive mechanism and the reflective mechanism. The findings aim to contribute to the body of “innovation and society” literature and provide detailed paths and mechanisms for the social value transformation process of meaningful innovation. The implications and limitations of our findings are also discussed for future research.