What next for digital social innovation?

Innovation foundation Nesta launched a new report on Digital Social Innovation (DSI) at its London offices on Tuesday 16th May 2017. DSI is a phenomenon in which thousands of people, projects and organisations across Europe are using digital technologies to tackle social challenges in fields such as healthcare, employment and education. Published to coincide with Tuesday’s live streamed event, Nesta’s research maps these projects and organisations, and explores the barriers to their growth.

Through crowdmapping DSI across Europe, it found that there are almost 2,000 organisations and over 1,000 projects using open and collaborative technologies to tackle social challenges. However, despite widespread activity, few initiatives have grown to deliver impact at scale, to be institutionalised, or to become “the new normal”. In this research, Nesta found that weak networks between stakeholders, insufficient funding and investment, skills shortages, and slow adoption by public sector and established civil society organisations is holding back the growth of DSI.

In its Policy recommendations Nesta suggests that funders and policymakers should:

1. Support DSI through funding mechanisms. Private and public funders of social innovation should ensure that DSI organisations and projects are able, and encouraged, to access funding.
2. Invest in intermediaries and the support infrastructure for DSI. Currently, some large-scale investment goes to individual projects while the majority of projects miss out. Focusing instead on investment in infrastructure such as incubators, accelerators, network-building, physical hubs and training initiatives would enable a more decentralised system capable of supporting a wider range of DSI initiatives.
3. Invest in and enable DSI approaches within existing civil society organisations. Private and public financial support for DSI should not only focus on startups and grassroots organisations, but also on improving digital maturity in established civil society organisations and supporting DSI initiatives within them.
4. Enable peer learning and the spread of best practice.The European Commission should continue to invest in peer learning and knowledge-sharing initiatives, both online and offline. This must happen not only between practitioners but also between funders, policymakers and investors.
5. Conduct further research into the supporting conditions and models for growth and sustainability of DSI. The European Commission should support research into the enabling conditions of DSI and growth and sustainability models for DSI initiatives.
6. Use public procurement to advance DSI. The public sector at European, national and sub-national levels should support DSI by promoting open-source where possible, piloting DSI in testbeds and adopting innovative methods of procurement such as pre-commercial procurement.

For further information visit digitalsocial.eu.

Click to download a copy of the Nesta Digital Social Innovation Report