Institutional embeddedness and the scaling-up of collaboration and social innovation: the case of a Hong Kong-based international NGO

This chapter utilises the case of an international NGO (INGO) in Hong Kong to explore how institutional embeddedness may facilitate the scaling-up of collaboration and social innovation. Adapting Hess’s (2004) framework, we contend that the scaling-up of collaboration among organisations is affected by the societal, network and territorial embeddedness of the organisational actors. These three forms of embeddedness dynamically affect each other through the agency of the actors. The concept of embeddedness also usefully illustrates how networks and collaboration can scale up beyond the local level, thus providing the conditions for the scaling-up of social innovation.