Digital and technological social innovation

Chairs: Fiona Henderson (Glasgow Caledonian University), Julie Adair (Glasgow Caledonian University)

The pandemic has accelerated the emergence of Digital and Technological Social Innovations (DTSIs) as mechanisms for addressing challenging social problems in health, inequalities, migration, social exclusion, the environment, and more. In 2020, a range of DTSIs became integrated mainstream resources, ensuring the continuance of routine health services, education, commerce, citizen engagement, and even democracy.

Digital and Technological Social Innovations have always engaged stakeholders and empowered people to act, and during the crisis of 2020 they demonstrated their powers in maintaining societal functioning and capabilities. Yet DTSIs remain underrepresented in academic literature, and theories explaining their emergence are largely absent. Greater academic insight and understanding is needed to explain the current and future potential of digital and other technologies to generate and sustain social change. Furthermore, society’s interaction and engagement with DTSIs can create unexpected and unintended impacts, some of which are problematic, and these also remain largely unexplored by academic research.

To this end, we invite papers on the following (non-exhaustive) list of topics: 

• DTSIs and the pandemic
• DTSIs, ethics and neutrality in social innovation
• DTSIs in the public sector and civil society organisations
• Citizen engagement through DTSIs
• Theories of DTSIs
• The role of DTSIs in disrupting the status quo
• Organisational dynamics and business models sustaining DTSIs
• Managerial and entrepreneurial challenges in DTSIs
• DTSIs ecosystems, networks and network effects
• DTSIs case studies
• DTSIs and gender
• Future trends in DTSIs.