Sub-theme 50: Open Social Innovation: Exploring the Role of Time, Space, and People in Tackling Societal Challenges
Call for Papers
In light of the increasing complex social and environmental problems our society faces - from poverty, access to education,
climate change to aging and health, there is a recognition that we need coordinated and collaborative efforts to address them.
Open Social Innovation (OSI) refers to new forms of organizing bringing together actors from various sectors along the social
innovation process – from identifying the problem, working and prototyping potential solutions, to scaling solutions (Fayard,
forthcoming; Mair & Gegenhuber, 2021).
Such open social innovation efforts take multiple forms, from
in-person hackathons to online challenges and crowdsourcing platforms, which have become increasingly popular over the last
few years. Organizational researchers have studied OSI in the context of open innovation platforms like OpenIDEO or open social
innovation projects triggered by the pandemic such as #WirvsVirus or #EUvsVirus (Bertello et al., 2021; Diriker et al., 2022;
Fayard, forthcoming; Lifshitz et al., 2020; Mair & Gegenhuber, 2021; McGahan et al., 2020; Pache et al., 2022; Porter
et al., 2020).
Building on this stream of research this sub-theme engages with current knowledge and theories
at the intersection of multi-stakeholder and cross-sectoral collaboration, engagement, power dynamics, social movements, open
innovation, user innovation, crowdsourcing, and social innovation to examine open social innovation. As open social innovation
requires orchestration of collective action to generate social impact, we are also interrogating the role of social impact
orchestrators (Mair et al., 2022).
To stimulate generative conversations in the subtheme, we propose the
dimensions of time, space and people as useful anchors for studying and theorizing open social innovation. We welcome empirical
(qualitative, quantitative, mixed methods) or conceptual papers.
Time
Given
the urgency required to face the multiple challenges and crisis our societies face, open social innovation needs to balance
expectations and realistic assessment of time in affecting change and transformation processes. How do social impact orchestrators
organizing open social innovation shape such expectations? (Wenzel et al., 2020). Moreover, in open social innovation
project stakeholders across sectors jointly develop solutions to complex social problems over a period of time.
Some studies suggest that this might require closing of the process to some participants at specific times. However, shutting
out certain participants might be perceived as illegitimate (Dobusch & Dobusch, 2019; Hautz et al., 2017; Hilbolling et
al. 2021; Diriker et al. 2022). How to best structure time to nurture engagement among multiple stakeholders? Moreover,
as social impact orchestrators seek to foster collaboration between different stakeholders (such as a bureaucratic public
administration and a flexible citizen initiative) with different temporal horizons, they have to navigate across these different
temporalities (Hilbolling et al. 2021). This raises the question of how temporal horizons shape the collaboration between
different stakeholders such as public administrations and citizen initiatives.
Space
Open
Social Innovation creates ‘flux spaces’ where actors from different societal sectors come together. Multiple studies have
highlighted the generative power of spaces – e.g., coffee shops (Ellis, 2004), clubs (Furnari, 2014), or maker spaces (Anderson,
2012). Indeed, such informal spaces can trigger encounters, some turning into collaborations, between various participants
with diverse backgrounds and interests. The need for spaces where diverse actors can interact and overcome their differences
(Ferraro et al., 2015) is reflected by the development of concepts such as interstitial space (Furnari, 2014). Are these
spaces different when it comes to developing ideas for addressing complex social issues?
While scholars
looked at how physical and virtual spaces shape organizing dynamics (Fayard & Weeks, 2007; Haug, 2013; Kellogg, 2009;
Ometto et al., 2019), we need to know more about where and how actors come together, and what might be the characteristics
of spaces that trigger and/or support open social innovation. For instance, in the virtual realm, we know that the affordances
of social software constrain and enable how users interact (Leonardi & Vaast, 2016) and might allow people to construct
a sense of place (Fayard, 2012). Are they any specific affordances for spaces (virtual or physical) that nurture open
social innovation – both in virtual and face-to-face settings? As some of open social innovation initiatives tend to
increasingly combine multiple modalities (starting online and then having one or a couple of workshops; or on the contrary,
starting online and then including one in-person event), how do online, offline or hybrid settings shape open social innovation
processes?
People
Without people, there is no social innovation.
Bringing people together in open social innovation is about ideas and creating communities (von Hippel, 2017). While
we know quite a lot about how to organize and manage communities (e.g., Fayard & DeSanctis, 2010; Faraj et al., 2011;
Reischauer & Mair, 2018; Leone et al. 2021), we need to know more about how social impact orchestrators sustain engagement
and facilitate collective action from ideation to implementation.
In their efforts to generate impact,
social change orchestrators face several critical decisions; for example, should an open social project support with limited
resources support as many ideas as possible or focus on the in-depth support of a few teams (Mair et al., 2022). Such decisions
also inspire to probe deeper into who might participate in an open social innovation journey. For instance, hackathons
usually attract more men than women (Briscoe & Mulligan, 2014). Consequently, it is not surprising that recent research
on open forms of organizing called for further research how community management considers inclusion and exclusion dynamics
in such settings (Dobusch, 2021).
References
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