Experimenting a Digital Collaborative Platform for Supporting Social Innovation in Multiple Settings

Abstract

Social Innovation is gaining popularity as an approach to address societal challenges. Governments, charities, NGOS and organizations are taking up the role of facilitating citizens participation into social innovation initiatives. Digital collaborative platforms have a great potential for enabling and supporting the social innovation process as it facilitates knowledge sharing, cooperative work and networking. In this work, we experimented using a digital social innovation platform and associated methodology for supporting citizens to do social innovation in three different pilots settings: an university course, a contest/hackathon and an “in the wild” scenario. We reflect on the participants usage and experience with the platform for understanding its added value and uncovering important considerations for designing and implementing this type of platform. The analysis of the experiments highlights (1) the value of facilitating collaboration with beneficiaries and across different backgrounds, (2) the importance of actively engaging participants on process and (3) the needs of adapting the platform for handling complexities risen from the social innovation process on real settings.