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.

View All Research
Research
Inequality
The Latino/a Scoreboard: A Policy Roadmap for Transforming Los Angeles

This report answers a series of critical questions about the opportunities and challenges facing Latino/as in Los Angeles County.

Research
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.

Emergency Aid Programs at USC and LACCD
Education
Emergency Aid Programs at USC and LACCD

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.

Research SIB
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.

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.

Social Innovation
Inequality
Housing Instability
Education
Criminal Justice