Abstract
This chapter develops reasoning on institutional innovation by using the example of community cooperatives. The institutionalization of community cooperatives is a recent phenomenon and is also shaped by recent legislative innovations. Beginning with summarizing the evolution of the community cooperative form in Italy, this study analyzes the community cooperative as an institutional innovation. We will learn that community cooperatives are new, but only partially new, leveraging essentially existing resources, actors, relationships, and institutions, albeit often to solve new or emerging problems. And yet, they constitute a novel configuration that generates further transformations in the socio-economic context in which they are established.