Towards Digital Ecosystems for Social Innovation (SIDEs): Success factors, challenges and opportunities
As part of the UA Ruhr College, an international workshop on digital ecosystems for social innovation will take place on 21 May in Essen from 14:00 to 18:00 as a hybrid event. This workshop, co-organised by Douglas Wegner, Senior Fellow at the College, and his tandem partner Jürgen Howaldt (TU Dortmund), will bring together various perspectives from invited experts in the field of social innovation.
The concept of innovation ecosystem has been used to describe a set of heterogeneous actors connected in a self-organised environment, in which these actors aim to produce joint value through the exchange of knowledge, combination of resources and collaboration. Although the concept has widely been used to refer to technological innovation, social innovation initiatives can also benefit from ecosystems since they reunite actors whose complementarities and resources can be combined to ease, accelerate, and disseminate social innovations. More recently, researchers and practitioners have directed attention to social innovation digital ecosystems (SIDEs), i.e., ecosystems “that provide the interaction of a community formed by actors whose objective is to develop social innovations to meet society's challenges through a common technological platform and a collaborative, inclusive, and open process” (Chueri, 2021). In this workshop, participants will discuss how digital ecosystems can support social innovation and what challenges such ecosystems must overcome to effectively foster and disseminate social innovation initiatives. Attendees will learn from experts in the field of social innovation as well as from cases in Latin America and Europe. As a main outcome of the discussions, the workshop aims to produce a policy brief that summarises recommendations for practitioners and policymakers and offers researchers a set of suggestions for future research.
The workshop will take place as a hybrid event and is free of charge.Both digital participation and on-site participation are possible. Registration is possible and necessary via the event homepage.
Further information: https://www.college-uaruhr.de/news-events/events/social-innovation-digital-ecosystems