Designing a Social Innovation Based Knowledge Support System: A Preliminary Guideline

Abstract

Policy makers and funding agencies increasingly emphasize the social nature of innovation. However, focusing just on the product side of social innovation might easily reduce the concept to commercialization of social goods. Engagement of all stakeholders in the knowledge co-creation process makes innovation really social. The aim of this paper is to highlight the essential elements of a social value creation based support system that would engage all stakeholders to the innovation process. To explore this guideline, we conducted a case-study research using qualitative data collected from diverse stakeholders of an NGO involved in early age child education in Turkey. Our findings suggest that social innovation based support systems require an architecture bridging the coordination of both online collaboration and knowledge management tools to the offline communities of practice. The most important challenge to this architecture is integrating piecemeal tools and practices into a social ecological system.