The paper “Social Innovation and Social Development” by Knut Ims and Laszlo Zsolnai has been presented at the The Eight Transatlantic Business Ethics Conference (TABEC) held at the Mendoza College of Business, University of Notre Dame, Indiana, USA on October 23-25, 2014. The authors criticized the business models of the Bottom of the Pyramid (BoP) approach, arguing that the success of BoP businesses will finally be limited because they do not transcend the logic of mainstream, materialistic business.
The paper analyses the cases of the Economy of Communion in Latin America and Europe, SEKEM in Egypt and Aravind Eye Care System in India as alternative social innovation models which show that an ethos for serving the common good appears to be a precondition of successful social innovation.