Service Design for Social Innovation through Participatory Action Research

Social innovation has many challenges in practice due to the complexity of stakeholders and ecological systems involved in the framework of value co-creation. First of all, the difficulties often occur during the value co-creation processes of multi-disciplinary stakeholders because of their diverse viewpoints and backgrounds, so a more effective approach is needed to enhance cooperation, communication and ideation. Secondly, social innovation needs long-term stakeholder involvement and continuous improvement to achieve the purpose of adoption and diffusion. It is challenging to build a sustainable mechanism to consistently trigger value co-creation and support transformation for key stakeholders. Today, service design that emphasizes holistic, multi-disciplinary, and integrative characteristics has become an important strategic means for many organizations to drive innovation. Therefore, through participatory action research with a social innovation platform in Taiwan, this study is designed to identify the crucial activities and useful service design tools which could facilitate multi-disciplinary ideation among different stakeholders effectively. Moreover, this study identifies four types of key stakeholders for building a sustainable value co-creation mechanism, and discovers the role positioning and motivators that can drive them to continuously participate in the mechanism from a service design perspective.