The Digital Social Economy

Abstract

"Digitalisation and other advanced technologies are increasingly reshaping our economy, including social economy enterprises. Disruptive technologies can inspire the social economy and vice versa. Blockchain for instance carries an intrinsic decentralisation approach that could have many implications for services and generate a high social added value through traceability, fair pricing, commonly recognised and verified standards and democratization of access to services and products in all societies and areas." - Ms Ulla Engelmann, Head of Unit for Advanced Technologies, Social Economy and Clusters, European Commission, DG Grow In the first two decades of the new century digital technologies have started to reshape work, leisure, behaviour, health, education, money, governance, and other aspects of human life. As people and businesses start using digital appliances for all kinds of interaction, an increasing amount of communication and value exchange shifts to the digital realm. This megatrend holds many promises to spur innovation, generate efficiencies, and improve services, and in doing so boost more inclusive and sustainable growth. But these technologies also tend to disrupt traditional ways to organize our economy and society, entailing important consequences for people, organisations and markets, and raise important issues around jobs and skills, privacy, security. We use the term digital transformation to describe these social, cultural, and economic changes resulting from digital innovations, and identify four socio-technological areas in which people are particularly affected by this transformation: work and income goods and services, money and finance, and state and governance. Digital platforms and blockchains (and other distributed ledger technology) are two of the most impactful technologies. Because of the astonishing possibilities these technologies offer, observers regularly fathom that it is not only unfeasible but also undesirable to ‘stop’ the digital transformation. Rather, it is argued that digital technologies and their impacts must be actively managed and leveraged to ensure their alignment with people-centred development and sustainability. In this context, a growing number of social economy innovations aim to create an internet and digital appliances that put individual users and society first. Social economy enterprises and organizations are either based on participatory governance where users are ultimately in (partial) control over the platform/technology, or bound by a statutory purpose asserting the priority of social and environmental goals before financial returns. The digital social economy innovations discussed in this paper aim to realize this vision in the four areas undergoing digital transformation. Our analysis is informed by insights from the workshop organised by Diesis on “Blockchain, digital social innovation and social economy. The future is here!”, as well as case studies elaborated in close collaboration with various digital social economy enterprises. The study finds a vivid variety of digital social economy enterprises, and important potential for further applications of social economy principles in the digital realm. Yet the realization of this potential depends on whether these enterprises manage the critical challenge to achieve sustainable and user-centred growth. We therefore conclude with a discussion of this challenge and some recommendations for policy, organization and entrepreneurship.