Conducting Action Research to Address Social Innovation

This case is an example of qualitative research in action. We followed the unfolding of a bottom-up process to develop a social innovation initiative. Launched by a young collective, in Bari, a town in the South of Italy, the initiative aims to leverage education using crowdsourced knowledge. The study is based on the results of an action research on a 12 days workshop and on the analysis of online discussions, paths, and topics over a 14-month longitudinal period. The study reveals how crowdsourcing acted as an opportunity to build a new community that revitalized the local social environment, and how design processes played a major role in community creation and instructed new governance models. It emerged the role of digital communications in building a network, which can generate and regenerate the local socio-economic fabric and connect it with the rest of the world. These results indicate the 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. As a pedagogical tool, this case will help other researchers and students learn how to collect data when dealing with a social change open process and a longitudinal analysis: in particular, we introduce and discuss design thinking, observation, and coding issues.