This communication is a study across two fields: management history and social innovation. This is an attempt to show that most of the current fundamental postures of social innovation were contained in the 1920s’ philosophies of management. Our demonstration is based on a historical study comparing the development of conceptual edifices of two figures of management, both also concerned with social innovation: Mary Parker Follett (1868-1933) and Oliver Sheldon (1894-1951). In a way, these two pioneers of management have created, a hundred years ago, a language to define management, based on the fundamental assumptions that social innovation adopts nowadays.