The growth of digital social innovation in Europe. An Open Design approach to support innovation for the societal good

Abstract

Built upon the definition of social innovation, the umbrella expression “digital social innovation” was introduced to describe a wide range of projects that use digital technologies, community engagement and collaboration, co-creation strategies and bottom-up approaches to solve societal needs, in opposition to the centralized proprietary solutions owned by a few companies. Assessing how digital social innovation projects can scale in order to have a better impact, is crucial to provide a concrete European model to innovation creation that considers values beyond economic factors. This paper presents the results of a one-year training program aimed at supporting the scalability of digital social innovation projects in order to have a better impact. In particular, it describes the application of an open design approach to the design of a P2P mentoring model, and a sustainability toolkit that faces the issue of generating capacity building in emerging community of tech social innovators.