Aim of this paper is to analyze the welfare through the lens of social innovation and related concepts emerged in the recent scientific and political-institutional literature, trying to grasp the dimensions mainly hermeneutics, epistemological and ethical issues that characterize social innovation and the evolution of welfare as rational processes of knowledge and decision (ie observation-experimentation, conceptualization-interpretation, evaluation-judgment and decision-action). Through this methodological scheme the author also seeks to develop the path selection, evaluation and presentation of some ideas of interpretation offered in the literature, nothing the cultural significance - even before the economic, social, political and institutional - of these innovative processes.