The motivation to start the ROSI group are recent developments in open innovation and citizen engagement echo the need for inviting multiple actors to participate in problem solving and ideas generation to address complex social issues. Such open innovation efforts – from hackathons to online challenges and crowdsourcing platforms such as OpenIDEO – have grown in the last few years, especially with the COVID pandemic (see for instance the #WirvsVirus or #EUvsVirus hackathons in Europe) opening a lot of opportunities but also empirical challenges and theoretical questions regarding cross-sectoral collaboration, engagement, power dynamics and impact / implementation. Hence, we believe it is timely and important to take stock of our current knowledge and theories on open innovation, user-generated innovation, crowdsourcing and social innovation to fully understand the phenomenon of open social innovation, i.e. organizing social innovation in open and participatory ways.
The ROSI group shares knowledge and expertise, develops a research community and possibly delineates a research agenda. We engage in activities such as thematic-focused online-meetups (e.g. on hackathons), submitting sessions to conferences (EGOS, AOM) or joint research activities.
Follow our activities on our news section or social media (see @johannamair, @gegenhuber, @alffayard, Paolo Leone)