The current global economic system is driving an unsustainable society. The planet has limited resources, and the economic system exists within these limits. To move society towards sustainability, one must consider how to provide necessary services to a growing population while decreasing dependencies on resource consumption. This research aims to show that Collaborative Services offer one solution to communities by providing a platform for sharing and exchange of resources through innovation and participation. Collaborative Services are designed and utilized on a local scale, to meet specific community needs and have been found to provide Social, Natural, Human, Political, Cultural, Built and Financial Community Capital returns on investment. Successful Collaborative Services have certain ‘ingredients’ that guide them which include: leadership and vision, strategies to involve key stakeholders, organizational resilience considerations as well as financial, technical and physical supports for Collaborative Services. This research shows the benefits and ingredients of successful Collaborative Services, in order to promote their emergence and provide support for communities working with Collaborative Services. Using a strategic sustainable development lens this research suggests that Collaborative Services can act as a tool to pull communities towards sustainability.

Universities and their partner organisations are promising that short-term work placements in social entrepreneurial organisations will increase student employability, leadership skills, and knowledge of socially innovative practice, while providing students meaningful opportunities to ‘change the world;’ yet theory and empirical studies are lacking that show what is beneficial and important to students, how students develop, and what influences their development through these cross-cultural and interdisciplinary experiential learning programs. This is the first study to explore the value of UK and US students participating in international internships and fellowships related to social entrepreneurship from a socioeconomic perspective. For this study, a value heuristic was developed from organisational models in the social entrepreneurship and educational philosophy literature followed by a qualitative longitudinal multiple case study. Fifteen individual student cases were chosen from two programmes involving two UK and three US universities, taking place in eleven host countries over five distinct data collection intervals. Findings across cases show a broad range of perceived value to students: from research skills and cross-cultural understanding, to critical thinking and self-confidence. Findings also show how student perspectives changed as a result of the placement experience and what ‘internal’ and ‘context-embedded’ features of the placements influenced students’ personal and professional lives. However, the ambiguity of social impact measures raises ethical questions about engaging students with limited knowledge, skills, and preparation on projects where they are unprepared to create long-term value for beneficiaries. This study contributes to the literature on higher education and international non-profit and business education by: providing an expansive matrix of value to students engaging in international placements; initiating a ‘hybridisation’ theory of personal value; creating a rigorous methodology transferable to similar programmes; outlining embedded features that programme developers can integrate in order to improve their own social and educational impact; raising ethical questions related to theory and practice; and including the researcher’s own multi-continent journey into the substance of the work.

Multinational Corporations (MNCs) currently face not only a dynamic business environment and challenging profit target, but also increased expectations from the public to take responsibility for addressing social, economic, and environmental issues. There is a tendency that the leading companies in the global market, especially MNCs, put more effort to the Social Innovation (SI). This study is to investigate what drives the MNCs to be involved in social innovation. In order to find out the reasons, we make use of the literature related to social innovation and social entrepreneurship to develop a framework of the motivation of MNCs towards social innovation. The framework combines three different perspectives (Individualistic Perspective, Organizational Perspective, and Institutional Perspective) to describe the motivation of MNCs. It includes ten main factors: philanthropy, ethics, self-awareness, new business opportunities, interfuntional collaboration, corporate culture, laws and regulations, market demands, strategic collaboration and territorial development. The study is also built on rich data collected through semi-structured interviews together with secondary sources from four MNCs in the different industries: KPMG, Coca-Cola, Porsche, and Philips. However, the empirical evidence indicates a revised framework of motivations of the social innovation in MNCs, including six main factors: self-awareness, new business opportunities, interfuntional collaboration, corporate culture, market demands, and strategic collaboration. Our research made a step into unexplored field of motivation of the MNC being involved in SI and hopefully will go further to investigate the rationale for such involvement.

L’innovation sociale résiste mal à l'épreuve du temps. Quand la plupart des expériences s’épuisent et disparaissent rapidement, certaines parviennent à se pérenniser. Le cas des réseaux de formation entre pairs pose encore d’autres questions. Qu’il s’agisse de réseaux d'apprentissage, de communautés de pratiques, de dispositifs collaboratifs, de Massives Open Online Courses (MOOCs), de groupes d'entraide mutuelle ou de formations par les pairs, ils sont particulièrement soumis à des transformations en fonction des besoins, des actualisations de contenu ou des engagements : quelles sont les caractéristiques particulières de ces dispositifs ? Quelles logiques les acteurs mettent-ils en oeuvre pour les inscrire dans la durée ? Peut-on dégager de leur analyse des facteurs de pérennisation ?C'est principalement à ces questions que cette thèse apporte des éléments de réponse, en prenant appuis sur le cas des Réseaux d’Echanges Réciproques de Savoirs (RERS). Elle présente successivement : une approche sociohistorique des différentes formes de coformation depuis le 19ème siècle ; une revue de la littérature dans le domaine ; un cadre théorique principalement appuyé sur la sociologie des organisations et l’approche sociotechnique ; la méthodologie principalement inspirée de la théorie ancrée ; les résultats les plus pertinents.Ce que cette recherche montre est l’importance des convergences de valeurs, conceptions, récits, aspirations, types d'organisation et outils qui fondent identité du collectif d’acteur engagés qui combinent ces éléments dans des formes locales d’appropriation qui permettent une réinvention du sens des actions et des pratiques. / Social innovation stands up with difficulty to the test of time. While most experiments run down and disappear quickly, some of them perpetuate. The case of knowledge exchanges networks between peers raises other questions. Whether in the case of learning networks, of communities of practice, of collaborative devices, of Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), of mutual help groups or fo training by peers, these networks are particularly subject to change according to needs, according to content updating or to commitments. How are these devices characterized? What are their actors’ logics in order to make them perpetuate? Can we bring to light, from their analysis, some factors of perpetuation? Our doctoral thesis tries to provides some answers to these questions, through the example of knowledge exchanges networks. We present research studies about peer training after having described their different forms since the 19th century, in a socio-historical perspective. Based on a methodology inspired from grounded theory, this thesis articulates research studies from the organisational sociology with the socio-technical approach of training. The case of knowledge exchanges networks brings to light the role of shared values, of conceptions, of narratives, of expectations, of types of organisation and of tools that forge a national identity, combined with local forms of appropriation of these components that allow to reinvent the sense of actions and practices.

This dissertation is one of the earliest to systematically apply and empirically test the resource-based view (RBV) in the context of nascent social ventures in a large scale study. Social ventures are entrepreneurial ventures organized as nonprofit, for-profit, or hybrid organizations whose primary purpose is to address unmet social needs and create social value. Nascent social ventures face resource gaps and engage in partnerships or alliances as one means to access external resources. These partnerships with different sectors facilitate social venture innovative and earned income strategies, and assist in the development of adequate heterogeneous resource conditions that impact competitive advantage. Competitive advantage in the context of nascent social ventures is achieved through the creation of value and the achievement of venture development activities and launching. The relationships between partnerships, heterogeneous resource conditions, strategies, and competitive advantage are analyzed in the context of nascent social ventures that participated in business plan competitions. A content analysis of 179 social venture business plans and an exploratory follow-up survey of 72 of these ventures are used to analyze these relationships using regression, ANOVA, correlations, t-tests, and non-parametric statistics. The findings suggest a significant positive relationship between competitive advantage and partnership diversity, heterogeneous resource conditions, social innovation, and earned income. Social capital is the type of resource most significantly related to competitive advantage. Founder previous start-up experience, client location, and business plan completeness are also found to be significant in the relationship between partnership diversity and competitive advantage. Finally the findings suggest that hybrid social ventures create a greater competitive advantage than nonprofit or for-profit social ventures. Consequently, this dissertation not only provides academics further insight into the factors that impact nascent social value creation, venture development, and ability to launch, but also offers practitioners guidance on how best to organize certain processes to create a competitive advantage. As a result more insight is gained into the nascent social venture creation process and how these ventures can have a greater impact on society.

>Magister Scientiae - MSc / Technology plays a big role in our lives. However, many do not have access to technology and the knowledge it provides, giving rise to the so-called digital divide. The purpose of this study is to explore and understand the impact of digital storytelling for social innovation, considering the digital landscape of South Africa. For example, it is important to consider what types of technologies have worked and are still working to capture stories. Furthermore, to consider what skills the end-users would require to use the system and what devices would be best suited for them—PC, laptop, tablet, or smartphone—and what software would be required to capture their stories. Finally, access to Wi-Fi or the Internet would need to be economically viable. Despite the vast research that has been done on digital storytelling, not much has been done in terms of its impact on social innovation and how a digital platform should be designed to enrich social innovation and creativity.

As the population of the world increases and cities grow in size, we are faced with remarkable societal problems regarding sustainable food security for the generations to come. In this paper, I present and discuss HAVE (Hydroponic Agricultural Vertical Environment), a research-through-design project that explores the design of an interactive open-source vertical kitchen garden. HAVE is designed as a shareable platform, that aims to lower the barriers of entry of getting started with home gardening, to provide an option for people to play an active role in working towards a more sustainable, resilient society. By simplifying the design of a computer-assisted garden, I present an engaging interactive system that is cheap and easy to build and maintain. With HAVE as a case study, this project also aims to expand upon how plant-based interfaces can be implemented in future design work, and builds upon the topics of calm technology and material computing. As such, this paper discusses the opportunities and challenges of designing plant-based interfaces, also in relation to how people care for and interact with plants. It is my hope, that HAVE may act as a conversation piece that addresses societal challenges regarding future agriculture practices, while contributing to the academic discussion and debate on the topics of plant-based interfaces, design for social innovation, and tangible computing, and the field of interaction design in general.

Screen readers for visually impaired users are poorly optimized for e-commerce websites hence the exclusion of the content. It creates a societal need for accessibility of the content in e-commerce websites for the visually impaired users. This study explores how six blindfolded participants could co-design a Voice User Interface (VUI) in an e-commerce website to convey its information that creates a good user experience for visually impaired. The result of a co-design workshop with interaction design practices showed that a VUI should be humanlike and convey relevant information. Failed speech recognition and overwhelming information had a negative impact on the user experience. To cope with the problems, the VUI should provide more control to the users by conveying explicit confirmations and retrospective information from past shopping trips. Due to the difficulties in finding visually impaired participants, the design process was not completed hence the ideation needs an additional design process.

Previous research has shown that institutional logics are the frame of reference used by individuals to make sense of their everyday life. This thesis aims to understand how such logics are displayed by actors in the public, private and non-profit sector and how they influence the construction of intersectoral collaboration for social innovation in a Swedish context. The aim is fulfilled through the research questions (i) How are institutional logics expressed by the informants? (ii) Do the interpretations of the ideal institutional logics influence the construction of boundary work? This is analyzed through the framework of boundary work.  This qualitative study was conducted through in-depth interviews with ten actors working in different sectors all participating in a coalition hosted by Mötesplats Social Innovation. The empirics demonstrate that the respondents display logics through four sub-themes; economic resources, incentives for activities through meaningfulness, source of authority and salient values. Various logics in the three sectors result in differences between the sectors. These differences lead to an advantage for intersectoral collaboration; thus, sectors hold different competencies and resources, resulting in fruitful collaboration, but also come with disadvantages such as unclear responsibilities, causing hindrance to collaborate. Actors base their actions in accordance with prevailing characteristics within the logic of their sector. Some characteristics overlap between sectors, and this answers research question two. Similar sectors tend to collaborate more than others, in this case, the public and non-profit, based on similar salient values and incentives for activities through meaningfulness but also due to a dependency from the non-profit sector’s side on the public sector for achieving economic resources. Further, logics create hindrances for intersectoral collaboration through its material attributes and lack of financial resources seems as the main hindrance to collaborate intersectoral for social innovation.

[pt] Esta tese investiga a contribuição do design para a inovação social dos serviços públicos de atenção primária à saúde. Para tanto, a tese foi organizada em três etapas (1) pesquisa em dados secundários sobre os campos do saber do design, dos serviços e do design de serviços; (2) observação participante em um projeto de pesquisa da Lancaster University, chamado Design in Practice, no qual foi possível identificar as abordagens utilizadas pelos designers de serviços voltados à criação de novos serviços de saúde para o Sistema de Saúde Público Inglês (NHS); (3) pesquisa-ação para avaliar o potencial do método, pela criação de um novo serviço de atenção à saúde, no contexto brasileiro, voltado aos portadores de diabetes tipo II. Esta foi conduzida na Unidade Básica de Saúde (UBS) Vila Gaúcha, na cidade de Porto Alegre, a partir da aplicação da abordagem projetual centrada na experiência dos usuários. Nessa etapa, foi possível fazer uma intervenção de design de serviços, criar um novo serviço de atenção de saúde aos portadores de diabetes tipo II e avaliar os resultados alcançados pelo novo serviço. Os resultados encontrados sugerem que a competência em design pode contribuir de diferentes maneiras para criação de serviços de atenção básica à saúde, a saber: (1) pela interpretação do valor e do significado do serviço para os diferentes atores envolvidos no seu uso; (2) pela tradução desse conhecimento em uma linguagem visual compreensível a todos, possibilitando a (co)criação de uma solução; (3) pela configuração do conceito do serviço, contribuindo para a construção de um argumento persuasivo sobre como as pessoas devem agir em uma determinada situação; (4) pela inclusão das pessoas, cujo comportamento precisa ser afetado, no processo de (co)criação desse argumento, favorecendo o surgimento de uma inovação social. Por fim, a tese apresenta uma proposta de método design de serviços para aqueles que têm por foco uma inovação social. / [en] This thesis investigates the design discipline contribution on primary care health services social innovation. To this end, the thesis has been divided in three stages: (1) desk research about design, service and service design disciplines; (2) participant observational research in Design in Practice research project at Lancaster University, where it was possible to identify the service designers approaches to create new services for British National Health System (NHS); (3) an action research to evaluate the potential of service design method by creating a new primary care health service for patients with type II diabetes, in the Brazilian context. This design project was conducted at Vila Gaucha Basic Health Unit, at Porto Alegre city, by using experience based design approach. At this stage, it was possible to make a service design intervention; to create a new primary care health service for patients with diabetes type II and to evaluate the results reached by this new service. The results shows that the design competence could contribute in different ways for the creation of new primary care health services: (1) by interpreting service value and meaning for different actors involved in its use; and (2) by translating this knowledge into a visual language understandable to all, allowing the co-creation of solution; (3) by configurating services concepts, it building a persuasive argument about how people should act in a certain situation; and (4) by including these people, whose behaviour needs to be affected, in the argument co-creation process, design makes more favourable the emergence of a social innovation. As a result of this investigation, this thesis proposes a method for designing services that focus on social innovation.