Exploring Islamic Economics'Inspired Organizational Features that Allow Social Innovation

Abstract

Besides Islamic Finance that continuously evolve and invent innovative products, discrete and shy organizations belong to the large sphere of Islamic Economics. Studying these latter can help with identifying key features that allow them to advocate for a different economy. However, research is focused on Islamic Finance, and Islamic Economics often isolated from economic paradigm-shift studies. The main objective of this qualitative study is to discover organizational features that are inspired from Islamic Economics’ principles and allow social innovation. We proceeded to a thematical analysis on secondary data that concerns two historical cases, as well as two scripts of interviews with two other contemporary organizations. The analysis revealed that for each organization several Islamic Principles are co-centric, that they can be considered as socially innovative mainly because they still have great potential to solve social problems, they’re driven by cultural reclamation and a motivation to change the abusive economic system. The findings suggest that Islamic Economics and Social Innovation are two research fields that can be bridged, and that these organizations can be of precious inspiration to social entrepreneurs.