How is Taiwan, which shares the institutional heritage of a developmental state, and social crises such as population reduction, local annihilation, and youth unemployment, implemented social economic policy? This study analyzes Taiwan’s uninstitutionalized social innovation policy, which is being promoted by flexibly connecting youth unemployment, regional regeneration, and social innovation, from a theoretical and comparative perspective. Taiwan’s social economic policy has comparative implications in three aspects. Taiwan, along with Korea and Japan, shares the institutional legacy of the developmental state of state-led economic growth. In addition, low fertility, population decline due to aging, jobless growth and youth unemployment, asymmetric population concentration and local extinction are also crises shared by Korea, Japan and Taiwan. For this reason, since the 2000s, East Asian countries have been promoting social economy strategies that foster companies that create social values according to profit motives. However, unlike Korea and Japan, Taiwan’s social and economic policies are characterized by ‘non-institutional social innovation’ in which related laws and regulations are not institutionalized. This study explains that Taiwan’s economic structure, centered on small and medium-sized enterprises, is a variable of the ‘non-institutional social economy’ and analyzes the impact on overcoming social structural crises such as youth unemployment and start-ups from a comparative perspective.