The Diffusion of Social Innovation

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Averack, Bennett, Gül, Machur, Menichinelli, Siniscarco / The Diffusion of Social Innovation with CreateHere (2012)

The Diffusion of Social Innovation with CreateHere Kyle Averack2, Charisse Bennett2, Oktay Gül4, Wolfgang Machur3, Massimo Menichinelli1, and Krista Siniscarco2 1

Aalto University, 2Savannah College of Art and Design, 3University of Witten/Herdecke, 4University of Cologne.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________ Abstract

Social innovation is an increasing common term being used to describe the new trend of developing publicprivate partnerships as a way of addressing large social issues within communities. While there are many pockets of social innovation around the world, the results of these efforts are mainly local. The lack of connection, communication, and collaboration between social innovation initiatives, organizations, and key players has hindered the diffusion of ideas, projects, and practices. The client for this project, CreateHere, was a non-profit organization founded in 2006 with the primary task of enhancing the arts, economic, and cultural development of Chattanooga, Tennessee. In collaboration with the client, a diverse global virtual team of graduate students set out to address the issue of identifying pockets of social innovation and the improvement and diffusion of social innovation process models. This study was a 25-week process comprised of research, analysis, synthesis, and prototyping stages. Data was collected through several primary research methods and data mining tools, such as Condor and Gephi, were used for coolhunting and coolfarming social innovation hub and incubators. The research ultimately led to the suggestion of developing an open-source platform for sharing social innovation ideas. The platform includes features such as a best-practices showcase and social networking functionality for building connections. This study concluded with a rough wire-frame prototype of the open-source platform, which can be further developed in future studies.


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