Stream 10

Chairs: Liz Chen (Innovate Carolina, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA), Anna LaFond (School for Visual Arts, Design for Social Innovation, USA)

Description:
What theories (named ones or proposed theories of change) guide your social innovation work? What methods do you employ to “do” or teach social innovation? ​

In order to bring about change in our organizations we must move away from abstract, hierarchical approaches and toward holistic interdisciplinary strategies for innovating and problem solving (Lake et al., 2016). Now that we’ve established the need for social innovations to address transdisciplinary grand challenges and to help reach ambitious goals like the Sustainable Development Goals, it is necessary to shift the conversation from why social innovation is important to how we create social innovations/social impact. What theories (named ones or proposed theories of change) guide your social innovation work? What methods do you employ to “do” or teach social innovation? It is important to train future generations of social innovators to be effective changemakers (Teasdale et al., 2021) and in order to support these changemakers in their journeys, we must create “intentional space for the practice of changemaking” (Ashoka, 2019).

Research in this space continues to evolve and we want to understand what social innovation theories and methods are working, what’s not, and what researchers and practitioners recommend as changemaking theories and methods that expand across educational and organizational landscapes (McLaughlin et al., 2022). We welcome researchers from different disciplines, sectors, and organizations to submit proposals for consideration.

We are seeking empirical or conceptual papers that will translate into interactive 15- to 20- minute workshops at the annual conference where you will share specific social innovation theories or methods, how they were applied, and the outcomes associated with your training research or project. Whether you’d like to model an activity, worksheet or template, discussion, or experience, we want to leverage this unique opportunity to learn from global social innovation researchers and collectively strengthen our ability to build changemaking and social innovation skills around the world.

References:
Ashoka, U. (2019), Preparing Students for a Rapidly Changing World: Social Entrepreneurship, Social Innovation and Changemaker Education, Ashoka U Internal Publication. 

Lake, D., Hannah, F., & Eardley, D. (2016). The social lab classroom: wrestling with -- and learning from -- sustainability challenges. Sustainability : Science, Practice, & Policy, 12(1).

McLaughlin, J. E., Chen, E., Lake, D., Guo, W., Emily, R. S., Chernik, A., & Liu, T. (2022). Design thinking teaching and learning in higher education: Experiences across four universities. PLoS One, 17(3).

Teasdale, S., Roy, M.J., Ziegler, R., Mauksch, S., Dey, P., & Raufflet, E.B. (2021) Everyone a Changemaker? Exploring Moral Underpinnings of Social Innovation Discourse Through Real Utopias. Journal of Social Entrepreneurship, 12(3), 417-437.