Service Design for Social Innovation through Participatory Action Research

Chen-Fu Yang, Tung-Jung Sung

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.