Research

The USC Price Center for Social Innovation brings an interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral approach to social innovation research. Through relevant, rigorous research, Price Center faculty explore a variety of topics that seek to inform and advance new models of equity and opportunity for low-income children and families.

This report details the findings of an evaluation of Emergency Aid (EA) programs at the University of Southern California and within the Los Angeles Community College District, which were designed to help students overcome short-term emergencies and ultimately improve longer-term student success.

Social Innovation

Social Impact Bonds 2.0

The complexity of social problems, paired with constrained public resources, requires social innovators to identify new approaches for financing the delivery of social services.

Criminal Justice

Literature Review: Fair Chance Policy Impacts

This literature review examines the implementation of Fair Chance and Ban the Box laws and their subsequent impact on justice-involved individuals, employers and their communities.

Housing Instability

Full Report: How do Renters Cope with Unaffordability?

This report presents findings from a survey conducted in 2019, focused on understanding the coping strategies & adjustments that LA renters make in response to high rents.

Criminal Justice

NDSC Criminal Justice Data Initiative: Year 1 Wrap Report

This report provides the project strategy overview, with key findings from analyses of listening sessions and public safety data.

Social Innovation

Towards a Theoretical Framework for Social Impact Bonds

Governments in some of the world’s richest nations appear to be caught in a double challenge of declining social budgets even as social needs are increasing.

Explore Social Innovation Research

Social innovation uses a flexible, responsive approach built upon an iterative process of concurrent problem identification, design, implementation, and evaluation of pilot programs and other test strategies, with the ultimate goal of diffusing new practices into systems change.

Social innovation includes a wide range of new organizational structures, financial tools, and partnership models that are more effective, equitable, and sustainable than existing problem solving approaches.

Research Topics

The Price Center conducts substantive social innovation research on a variety of complex, persistence social problems. Explore our work below, which includes projects representing the full social innovation ecosystem, from problem identification to piloting, scaling, and diffusing new models and processes to create social change in the following areas.

Inequality

Housing Instability

Education

Criminal Justice