Bottom-op social innovation initiatives commonly emerge as community responses towards unmet quotidian needs. Whether they appear in form of a product service system or a collaborative consumption network, the novelty of such an initiative is about identifying new bonds between existing elements and creating a design-based, alternative route.
Design thinking, which is the key element of innovation, is fed by personal encounters and a remarkably large part of our daily encounters occur in form of human interactions. In the case of bottom-up, solution oriented social innovation, where the problem owner decides to become the problem solver and actively applies design thinking, personal interactions play a crucial role. The success of the innovation and the durability of the solution become rather dependent on innovator's personal relationships, in other words: the innovator's network. By defining a 'network' as a system of relationships instead of a system of actors as the network theory suggests, this study identifies different natures of interactions that could occur within a social innovation network; namely: informal, managerial and content related interactions.(Monge and Contractor, 2003)
Correlatively to conventional innovation process, bottom-up social innovation goes through various phases from fuzzy problem definition phase to delivery of the new product or service phase. Throughout the complete process, different actors become involved in the project and interaction patterns between actors evolve constantly. Next to identifying different natures of interactions, the study presented in this publication also tries to identify generic interaction patterns that belong to each phase of a social innovation processes by using social network analysis tools. In other words, this can be seen as a search towards finding a link between interaction patterns and phases of social innovation.
Friesland, the northernmost province of the Netherlands, has been under economical and social pressure. The innovation capacity of the province is running low in comparison to rest of the country. The small amount of bottom-up social innovation attempts are struggling to move towards delivery phases and the local government took the decision to support the creatives in various ways. (Provinsje Fryslan, 2010) This study aims at providing the local government with precise feedback through mapping the interaction patterns of successful and problematic cases comparatively, in order to strategically recreate the social innovation networks within the province by detecting and improving the weak areas.
The development of social innovation networks is increasingly important for the realization of bottom-up social innovation on a local level. When formalized, these networks also carry the potential of becoming catalyzers between top-down policies of local governments and local initiatives. Establishing and facilitating such a network for stimulating bottom-up social innovation means making the first step towards embedding innovative thinking in the culture.
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Monge, P. and Contractor, N. (2003). Theories of Communication Networks. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Krimp en Groei 2010, Report of Demografyske feroaring yn de provinsje Fryslân by Provinsje Fryslan, The Netherlands
