Crowdsourcing to co-design meaningful social change
Nunzia Coco · Academy of Management Proceedings · 2017
This study follows a social innovation initiative to leverage education, in order to better understand how to develop crowdsourcing for effective social innovation. To address this research question, the author conducted action research on a 12 days workshop in the Old Town of Bari, neglected area in southern Italy. The workshop aimed to create a School Open Source with the help of the crowd, which was engaged to promote and co-create the social initiative. Furthermore the researcher collected and analyzed the online discussions, paths and topics from the days of the workshop to the opening of the School. The study reveals how crowdsourcing acted as an opportunity to build a new community which revitalized the local social environment. The author also found that design processes and digital communication played a major role on the community creation and instructed new governance models. These results indicate a first step towards a proposal for an open innovation model for social innovation which combines online crowd engagement with offline activities and where design processes nurture the sense of belonging between community and territory.