The emergence of a Social Innovation Ecosystem in Portugal: An exploratory approach based on the perspective of strategic stakeholders

The concept of ecosystem has been used to describe a dynamic set of relationships, services and interdependencies that potentiate the creation, renewal and growth of organizations. Social innovation is largely influenced by ecosystem conditions. The Portuguese social innovation ecosystem is a particularly interesting case study, as it assumes a hybrid structure that expresses a variety of policy schemes, networks and support structures. This article debates the concept of social innovation ecosystem and presents an exploratory approach to its mapping. Based on interviews with strategic stakeholders in the social and solidarity economy and social enterprises, the study elaborates on the specificities of the social innovation ecosystem. The Portuguese ecosystem is comprised of three sub-ecosystems that show different weights, limited connections and overlapping: social economy, social business, and the social solidarity ecosystem. The article concludes with an overview of the current state of social innovation, emphasizing the perspectives of stakeholders on recent experiences that the Portuguese state has developed in establishing dialogue within organizations integrating social innovation dynamics.

Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI): Scientometric Analysis

Innovation and research in various fields should be done responsibly. In the last years, there is this responsibility towards different stakeholders. One of the most important stakeholders are the community and the society. In this context, the concept of social responsibility and social innovation has become very widespread. The purpose of this study was scientometric analysis of concepts in the field of responsible innovation and responsible research. R software has been used to achieve this purpose. In this study, by analyzing the information extracted from related articles (572 articles from Web of Science), the new concept of RRI and the network of researchers in this regard have been identified and analyzed. In this study, based on a systematic literature review (SLR) and scientometric methods, the evolution of the concept of “Responsible Research” and “Responsible Innovation” in the literature is investigated. Also, the selected articles identified by the SLR method from different textual dimensions regarding journals, collaboration network, co-citation network, collaboration worldmap, historical direct citation network, and emergence of new concepts are analyzed. The results of this study indicate the development of related concepts in the literature in recent years and indicate the need for further studies in this regard.

Gobernanza Colaborativa para la Innovación Pública y Social: El caso de Gipuzkoa, País Vasco

La globalización y sus condiciones de desarrollo han puesto encima de la mesa una nueva agenda política caracterizada por la necesidad de abordar desafiantes retos sociales. Asimismo, la crisis de la democracia liberal ha evidenciado la necesidad de nuevos modelos para la gestión del espacio público y de las políticas públicas. Este artículo aborda el concepto de la Gobernanza Colaborativa como un mecanismo para estimular los procesos colectivos de deliberación a través del establecimiento de decisiones formales orientadas al consenso para identificar prioridades y generar líneas de actuación en los territorios. En este marco, el artículo presenta la experiencia práctica de Gobernanza Colaborativa “Etorkizuna Eraikiz”, programa diseñado e implementado por la Diputación Foral de Gipuzkoa, explicitando los elementos estructurales que componen el programa y analizando el funcionamiento del modelo en el que se enmarca.

Spread and conditions of Social Innovation Research in Austria in the field of Social Sciences

This paper scrutinises the spread and the conditions of social innovation research in Austria in social sciences. Although the empirical results are inconclusive, social innovation is definitely not a marginal topic in social sciences in Austria. More than 80% of the responding social scientists deal with social innovation at different levels of intensity. It also seems that social innovation works well for the overall self-representation of the universities. The construct of social entrepreneurship has probably contributed most to anchoring the notion of social innovation in the higher education sector in Austria, especially in teaching. Although some curricula and courses are more confined to traditional business school topics, some transcend the narrow business focus towards sociological and political approaches. The academic embedding of social innovation in Austria, however, is still hampered by structural factors. Our findings show a lack of both tangible and intangible support measures.

Social movements in a time of pandemic: The case of Tech4Covid19 in Portugal

The COVID-19 pandemic had a strong impact on Portuguese society and raised the need for new technological projects to help frontline professionals in the fight against coronavirus and its effects on the local population and economic agents. It is in this context that the Tech4Covid19 movement was founded by Portuguese technological startups. This initiative brings together more than 5000 volunteers and offers technological solutions in the areas of health, education, and local economy. This study aims to understand and explore the organizational model and dynamics of Tech4Covid19 through the adoption of qualitative methods based on primary and secondary sources that have allowed the movement to be explored from multiple perspectives. The findings reveal that Tech4Covid internally promotes the development of its own projects, but also accepts projects proposed by external entities that are aligned with the principles and values of the movement. The organization of the movement is supported by autonomous self-managed teams regarding each project, and there is a coordination group responsible for the aggregate management of the various initiatives and for establishing communication with partners, the media, and social networks.

Challenges of impact assessment in Social Innovation: A qualitative study from two European rural regions

Over recent years, various approaches to assessing the impacts of social innovation (SI) have developed without a uniform method having arisen. There are some issues around how impacts can be assessed, connected with the questions on the nature of impacts, the levels of analysis and effects of a purely positivist approach to impact assessment. While attempting to assess such impacts, various SI initiatives face the diversity of challenges. To this end, the aim of the article is to investigate the experience of said initiatives promoting social innovation related to impact assessment of social innovation. The paper is based on an empirical study conducted with the local development associations and local action groups involved in social innovation projects in two rural regions of Austria and Portugal. The results indicate that, despite recognising the importance of impact assessment regarding social innovation activities and the opportunities it provides, local organisations in question face many challenges in assessing the impacts of social innovation, including conceptual and practical difficulties.

Social participation in the media: The dialogue of digital journalists with audiences

The emergence of social media altered the relation between journalism and the public in digital media and bequeathed the relationship a more active and collaborative role. As such, the general objective of this research is to characterise the dialogue between digital journalists and their audiences through social media and to describe how they perceive the consequences of this relationship. To this end, a survey was conducted with 73 digital journalists. The results display an ambivalent attitude on the part of the professionals regarding the use of social media as a tool for dialogue with their audiences. On one hand, they believe that using them is a priority need to maintain a fluid relationship with readers, although they mainly lean toward a majority one-way and limited use of them and believe that media managers have mainly perceived participation as a channel to garner audience loyalty and increase audiences.

News consumption and COVID-19: Social perception

On 14 March 2020, the Spanish Government declared a state of alert for the first time since the reinstatement of democracy, confining millions of people to their homes in effort to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. Amid emergency situations such as this, people need to be informed (Seeger et al., 2003). In light of this demand for information, the media responded by heightening the attention afforded to the pandemic and its news coverage, a phenomenon which has occurred repeatedly in similar situations (Ducharme, 2020; Pieri, 2018). Based on a survey of over 2,000 Catalan citizens during the period of lockdown, the main aim of this article is to analyse how the pandemic changed their information habits, gauge their perception of the media’s coverage and determine whether this coverage produced information overload. The results show an upsurge in media consumption as well as information overload among virtually half the population. This generates a paradox: despite the increased consumption of information, the media did not help to improve people’s understanding of the pandemic, but instead resulted in information fatigue, thus hindering comprehension.

Data Journalism as an innovation in social communication: The case in sports industry

Data analysis has always been an integral part of journalism but combining it with technology was a novelty for newspapers. Journalism’s combination with technology was an innovation because of processing, interpretation, and visualization of large datasets in a journalistic content. In recent years, newspapers have started to adapt data journalism and integrated it to sports for better storytelling and making sports more understandable for readers. This research aims to analyse sports data journalism practices in Spain with a quantitative approach with content analysis of 1068 data journalism articles published by 6 newspapers (Marca, Mundo Deportivo, AS, El Mundo, El Periódico, El Pais) between 2017-2019. Quantitative analysis focuses on how sports data journalism is being adapted in Spain, technical features of articles, and the similarities and differences between sports and national newspapers to identify integration of sports data journalism.

Communications patterns and power dynamics in the digital public sphere: A case study of the conversation about Minimum Living Income on Twitter

In 2020, in the midst of the first wave of the pandemic, the Spanish Government approved the implementation of the Minimum Living Income, a non-contributory benefit under the Spanish social security system that guarantees a minimum income for those in need of one. Drawing on previous work of Stefania Vicari et al. (2018) about the use of political hashtag publics and counter-visuality on the Italian Twittersphere, we analysed patterns of communication among users on Twitter. Thus, this paper contributes to existing research on the deliberative process within the digital sphere, with a particular focus on power structures and communication patterns. Findings show that digital-born media, politicians and political parties play a central role in the discussion through mention and quoted tweets practices, but not in the production of new messages, while ordinary users are more likely to be retweeted. This would suggest a tendency towards retransmitting and disseminating content produced by ordinary users more than official sources.