Abstract:

In recent years, social innovation has gained prominence in public debates, and in policy agendas, as a viable approach to address an ample range of societal challenges including domains such as, youth unemployment, environmental concerns, demographic imbalances including ageing and migration flows, as well as any forms of social and economic exclusion.   Social innovation is associated with projects and organizations that hold the distinctive feature of combining, trough the setup of hybrid business models, revenue-generating functions with other activities targeted to promote social transformation and impact. The proliferation of social innovation initiatives creates new challenges for the qualification of individuals, notably concerning the development of transversal competences, and the orientation for social transformation. This study offers a contribution in this domain, building on the literature about competence development and on an exploratory survey to identify and characterize a framework for transversal competences that distinguishes tree dimensions: personal competences, collaborative competences and transformative competences. The study addressed young graduates, from different professional areas, and involved the collection of data in five countries, including Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Costa Rica, and Mexico, therefore allowing for an international perspective about differences in transformative competence perceptions across country contexts.