An observational study on the challenges faced by actors in a social innovation ecosystem

A social innovation ecosystem is a set of actors from different societal sectors and their environments with legal and cultural norms, supportive infrastructures and many other elements, which enable or inhibit the development of social innovations. In this context, several issues regarding information reuse and integration can be found. In this paper, we present an observational study where a real case of an emerging social innovation ecosystem was modeled and analyzed in order to identify the challenges faced by the actors. Results show the importance of adopting digital ecosystem concepts for an approach in which social innovation actors interact and collaborate through the support provided by a common technological platform, composing what we called as Social Innovation Digital Ecosystem (SIDE). Such approach aims to support social innovation actors towards fostering collaboration, co-creation, knowledge, and information sharing and reuse, enabling the development, dissemination and generation of more effective social innovations.