SOCRATIC is a project creating a platform for citizens and/or organisations to collaboratively do social innovation. The project develops a social innovation methodology along with supporting collaborative ICT system for supporting crowd based social innovation. The project pilots them in two real life scenarios.
Governments are faced with a number of growing social challenges, such as unemployment, ageing population and explosion of chronic disease. Although they offer a wide range of public social services, we cannot assume that the economy will grow at a rate that can cope with the expanding needs risen by these challenges.
Social innovations are new approaches to addressing social needs through engaging beneficiaries and supporting actors in the development of radically new solutions for efficiently tackling societal problems. There is great potential in exploiting digital networks for social innovation as collaboration and collective intelligence are the main key elements for enabling social innovation.
The EU/H2020 project SOCRATIC develops a digital social innovation platform that facilitates citizens and organisations to collaboratively develop innovative social solutions targeting the the Sustainable Development Goals set by the United Nations. Along with the platform, there is the SOCRATIC Social Innovation Methodology catering citizens without previous social innovation experience and taking advantage of the crowd-sourcing capabilities of the platform.
The project pilots the platform in two distinct contexts: one at an European NGO (CiberVoluntarios) which coordinates a large pool of volunteers doing social good using theirs technical knowledge; and, another at the "Experts in Team" program of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU-EiT) where multi-disciplinary group of students solve real problems.
The project's findings will help to demonstrate the effectiveness, compared to existing solutions, of new bottom-up, open and distributed approaches for social innovation exploiting crowd-based technology.
SINTEF role
- development of SOCRATIC's social innovation methodology;
- validation and assessment of the pilots;
- support the design of the platform
SINTEF participants
Project partners:
