Christoph Kaletka

Der Beitrag richtet den Blick auf das Feld der Innovationsforschung und insbesondere auf das Feld der sozialen Innovation. Er wird das Konzept der sozialen Innovation einführen und vor diesem Hintergrund reflektieren, wie neue Praktiken der Teilhabe an Gesellschaft entstehen, wie sie sich verbreiten und etablieren. (DIPF/Orig.)

Citizen science is becoming increasingly important as a new and participative mode of knowledge production. An essential element of citizen science is co-creation. Co-creation is by no means limited to a modus operandi for participatory science, but introduces a form of collaborative way of working with society in the sense of citizen science. Results from the H2020 SISCODE project show that co-creation is located inside and between different sectors of society. This article focuses on the question of how co-creation can be better understood in different contexts, and presents a heuristic model that has already been used for case study analyses in the SISCODE project. After an introduction to the field of co-creation and a brief description of the heuristic model, its capability is exemplarily demonstratedviaapplication to two selected cases, followed by a discussion of central learnings and implications for further research on co-creation.

Visions of a society for all are closely intertwined with the question of how to develop inclusive communities. Social innovations are able to facilitate inclusion and catalyse the improvement of participation opportunities, especially in urban settings, as this is the place where positive and negative transformation becomes noticeable first. New legislation on international, national, as well as on regional and communal levels has set new goals and standards regarding social inclusion in urban structures, and monitoring and reporting efforts will show whether these requirements are met or not. In recent years, social monitoring and reporting systems have evolved and gained a human rights-based perspective by denoting the actual life-situation of people affected. On the basis of the human rights approach to participation, Germany started to reconfigure its reporting system. First municipalities have started to implement it. This Paper reflects on two different approaches to implement the new federal reporting system on a local level. Based on a generic context-understanding guide of innovative processes, collaborative municipal reporting is analysed as a social innovation itself. It especially tries to single out the benefits collaborative and interdisciplinary modes of work may hold for city administrations in the field of social reporting efforts.

The problems society faces today are increasingly complex and rooted in likewise complex socio-technical systems. Unfortunately, the structures meant to face these challenges are not suitably equipped. There is a mismatch between the need and the capacity to respond. Design methods and approaches are now being employed to help capacitate cities and communities and structure social innovations around larger transition visions. As social innovations are highly context-dependent, the distinctive characteristics of the local context become important to the success or failure of such initiatives. In the paper, the authors explore this topic through the study of two cases in which top-down visions, negotiated at the niche-level, gave way to the structuration of an empowered ecosystem of actors, serving as a platform for iterative, social change. The cases are analyzed through an ‘Onion model’ in which four contexts are explored: roles, functions, structures and norms.

The significance of social innovations for successfully meeting social, economic, political and environmental challenges of the twenty-first century is recognized not only by stakeholders on the local, regional and even national level but also within the Europe 2020 strategy and on a global scale. However, despite this growing awareness, for a long time a sustained and systematic analysis of social innovation, its theories, characteristics and impacts was missing. In this setup, the paper seeks to contribute to a common theoretical ground in social innovation theory by elaborating on a comprehensive concept of social innovation grounded in social theory and discusses consequences for social innovations in the urban context. The paper starts with an outline of theoretical foundations of social innovation and investigates the relationship between social innovation and social change. It then discusses the consequences of a comprehensive concept of social innovation for the local level, highlighting its multi-sectoral perspective. Social innovation ecosystems are introduced as an emerging theoretical approach and heuristic model especially for urban social innovation. Here, results of a global mapping conducted by the international research project SI-DRIVE provide empirical insights into the diversity and current state of social innovation initiatives.