DSI Strategy Canvas: Modelling the Digital Social Innovation Strategy

Humanity’s main challenges are to solve social needs, such as: eradicating hunger and poverty; reduce racial and gender inequalities; promote environmentally sustainable behaviour, etc. Social needs motivate the raise of social innovations promoted by the most different actors, from government, companies, the third sector, to individual entrepreneurs and communities. To increase the scalability and impact of social innovation, it is generally necessary to use digital technologies. Thus, the concept of Digital Social Innovation (DSI) emerges, which is a type of social innovation mediated by digital technology, through which innovators, users and the community cooperate to co-create knowledge and solutions to meet social needs. This work reports the application of the scientific method for the development and evaluation of a practical and lean method to modelling viable and sustainable strategies of DSI enterprises. The result of this work consisted of a tool called DSI Strategy Canvas, which is based on determinants that lead to the achievement of the goals of the DSI and indicators that measure and evaluate the performance of the DSI. DSI Strategy Canvas is concerned with product strategy which involves product vision, target market, ecosystem integration, value delivery, revenue streams, risk and growth estimates, scalability, and product evaluation. For technological support to the DSI Strategy Canvas tool, a web-based software application was developed, which was used by social entrepreneurs in evaluating the proposed approach.