Purpose – The research fields of service innovation and social innovation have, until now, been largely disconnected. At the most basic level, a great many social innovations are services, often public sector services with social entrepreneurs organizing and delivering service innovations. As...

Gabriel Tarde was a French sociologist and criminologist whose work is rediscovered from time to time. Economists of innovation have paid insufficient attention to an author who devoted a large part of his work to the laws of imitation and invention. The purpose of this paper is threefold. The...