Abstract

This article explores how Fellows (future social entrepreneurs), who are enrolled in an early-career systems leadership training program, process and understand their capacity for implementing inclusive innovation in their leadership practice. Findings suggest that infusing an anti-oppressive perspective (AOP) reveals tacit knowledge as being crucial to organizational success. Tacit knowledge is embedded in an individual along the lines of experience, expertise, skills, abilities, actions, know-how, know-where, or know-whom and, if cultivated, may have the capacity to potentially orient social innovators toward sustainable innovation. Results from this study engages with cross-disciplinary scholarship and extend current analysis by drawing attention to the importance of building capacity in early-career systems leaders by especially grappling with organizational facilitators and detractors of capacity building. The article further highlights how this involves intentional learning by organizational thought leaders that allows them to develop theoretical and practical linkages between social innovation’s existing frameworks and equity, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) concepts.