- Title
- Evaluation of comprehensive social innovation projects: the case of a local German start-up initiative
- Creator
- Dotterweich, Christoph; Rosenberger III, Philip J.; Holzmüller, Hartmut H.
- Relation
- 11th International Forum on Knowledge Asset Dynamics (IFKAD 2016): Towards a New Architecture of Knowledge: Big Data, Culture and Creativity. Proceedings of the 11th International Forum on Knowledge Asset Dynamics (Dresden, Germany 15-17 June, 2016) p. 1384-1398
- Publisher
- Institute of Knowledge Asset Management (IKAM)
- Resource Type
- conference paper
- Date
- 2016
- Description
- Purpose: Social innovations are new strategies, concepts, ideas and organizations that meet social needs. Although there is no consensus in definition, they share certain commonalities: (1) novelty, (2) immateriality, (3) context-dependency, (4) complexity, (5) longevity and (6) diffusion. Assessing social innovations is therefore challenged by measurement difficulties and attribution problems. Albeit social innovations are playing a more and more important role to solve contemporary problems, very little is known about how they might be evaluated. Design/methodology/approach: The use case we report on in this study is "tu>startup", a local initiative in the greater metropolitan area of Dortmund, Germany. We have chosen this program as a proxy, because its design and main objective reflect the specifications of a typical social innovation. The multi-perspective and multi-method evaluation design we applied was composed of three evaluation studies: a benchmarking-evaluation study, a constantly implemented participant-evaluation study and, finally, a stakeholder-evaluation study. Originality/value: A strong emphasis was placed on a 360-degree approach, meaning that a variety of perspectives on the program's performance were included. Moreover, reviewing social innovations theoretically and conceptually, we derived three core evaluation criteria that are able to describe the success of a social innovation: use, diffusion and effects. Tailored and appropriate methods and measures were then used to gain the necessary information to apply the evaluation. Practical implications: This study contributes in identifying and applying a sound evaluation design to analyze and assess social innovations. For this purpose, three different approaches were used in order to gain relevant evaluation information considering the complex context of the program. Thus, the results of this research are expected to contribute improved monitoring and evaluating the success of social innovation ventures.
- Subject
- social innovation; evaluation research; evaluation criteria; Dortmund, Germany
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1345335
- Identifier
- uon:29618
- Identifier
- ISBN:9788896687093
- Language
- eng
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