Digital Social Innovation: Fundamentals and Framework of Action

Introduction

In a scenario of global economic and regulatory crisis, institutions and researchers in social sciences increasingly highlight the importance of the emerging social economy, a new axis of the economy that unites public and private sectors to create new relationships and social values (Bryer et al., 2012)¹.

In its midst we are facing an incipient field of study that is the result of the movement that is taking place worldwide and that is evolving at an accelerated and unexpected pace as much due to the number of initiatives—from grassroots community projects to large national companies and global networks that are causing a paradigm shift—as the variety of their approaches: Social Innovation (SI), understood synthetically as that which generates new ideas for solving social problems. It is, in short, a sector that is in full expansion around the world (Buckland and Murillo, 2013) for the growing interest it arouses.

The reason for all this can be found in the emergence of new social problems—such as climate change, the scarcity of resources, demographic transformation, massive immigration or high youth unemployment—that coexist with other already chronic ones such as unemployment, social inequalities, an aging population, environmental deterioration and the explosion of certain chronic diseases (Simon et al., 2014), all of them in need of new approaches that make it possible to find solutions that the methods applied in the past have not been able to solve (Murray et al., 2010). On the one hand, and while western governments face these growing social challenges through a wide range of public social services, there is no guarantee that economic growth will allow these public services to continue (Dinant et al., 2017). This is progressively creating budgets that are unaffordable for governments, even more so in undeveloped countries. On the other hand, market solutions are insufficient for solving these growing social needs in today's world.

Faced with this panorama, the world is being forced to find new ways to avoid social exclusion and protect the environment. This is where SI emerges as a new approach that faces this serious deficit through the participation of supporting agents and beneficiaries in the search for new solutions.

This must be so given that there is a growing disconnection between traditional services and new needs. SI is found to be a key vehicle for developing new ways of tackling complex social challenges at local, national and international scales arising from the committed work of individuals and groups in civil society, research groups, academic institutions, companies, governments, NGOs, social movements and the multiple networks created between groups. It is precisely these last groups that have caused a great advance in SI by the appearance of new approaches and ways of managing social changes.

These reasons have instigated a global lift-off of SI in the last decade and, with it, the need for a new paradigm—as in previous technological and social transformations. The nature and global effervescence of this field give rise to a large number of SI definitions, as well as innumerable tools and mechanisms for promoting SI radiating from all types of organizations and governments. In short, we aim to identify a notion of SI which is as widely accepted as possible, as well as the most effective SI mechanisms to find the best types of approaches, and defining and determining the social impact of these innovations and their long-term viability. All this heterogeneity and lack of clarity is reflected in a set of questions that are part of the global debate around SI: What does SI mean? Where are its limits? How is its impact measured? And what are the key success factors of a specific SI initiative?