The way ‘social innovation’ is understood in Belgium, and its most recent manifestations are arguably influenced profoundly by the 2008 crisis and its aftermath. In discussing social innovation in Belgium, one would look at its social economy landscape, which is fragmented due to Belgium’s different language groups, unions and political pressure groups, each soughting out to create their own flows of grant finance to the social economy sector. The topics of social innovation and social entrepreneurship are also increasingly becoming integral to Belgian universities’ teaching and research agenda.

Social innovation is time and context specific. That means it can mean different things in different context. What might not seem innovative in one country, may be ground breaking in another. The political and cultural background is important to understand. There are also a wide variety of organisations involved in this field, each have different perspectives. So, the purpose of this page is to demonstrate a variety of views on what social innovation means to different kinds of organisations in Belgium.