Designing a digital social innovation platform: From case studies to concepts

Abstract

Governments in the western countries are faced with a number of growing social challenges, such as unemployment, migration, ageing population, explosion of chronic disease. Although they offer a wide range of public social services, we cannot assume that the economy will grow at a rate that can fund expanding needs for services risen by these challenges. We have to find new ways to adapt service provision and prevent social exclusion. Social innovations are new approaches to addressing social needs through engaging beneficiaries and supporting actors in the development of solutions. There is great potential in exploiting digital networks for social innovation. Supporting virtual communities and new forms of collaboration, digital networks make it possible to co-create knowledge and solutions at a wide scale. Various digital social innovation platforms have emerged in the recent years. However we observe that these platforms focus on specific areas, such as open democracy, collaborative consumption or environment, rather than providing support for a wide range of social challenges. We propose to develop a digital social innovation platform that facilitates citizens and organisations to collaboratively develop innovative social solutions. From the analysis of the current innovation processes and the expectations of two distinct cases, Cibervoluntarios (CIB) and Experts-In-Teamwork (EiT), we derive an initial set of concepts that serve as a basis for the development of a methodology and platform for social innovation.