Teaching social innovation through university projects: The role of ‘double agents’ in creating collaborative value

Description

Social innovation education has grown in popularity as one of the ways that higher education institutions can have a positive impact on wider society. Teaching social innovation often involves engaging with community-based organizations through service-learning programs or company projects with social enterprises. How is social value created in these engagements, and through what modalities? We conducted six annual cycles of action learning using our own teaching to analyze 82 projects where teams of students engaged with socially innovative community-based organizations to address a particular organizational challenge. In the initial action learning cycles, we identified core dichotomies: insider versus outsider perspectives to the social / institutional context for value creation, and problem-solving versus analytic modalities for addressing organizational challenges. Through further cycle iterations, we learned that these hybrid tensions between different contexts and modalities contributed to the co-creation of shared social value when facilitated by a double agent – an insider in both the academic and practitioner contexts. This contextualized understanding of different perspectives in problem-solving and research analysis that co-exist in tension contributes to further developing the concepts of shared social value and place-based learning, and their significance in social innovation education.

Period	7 Jul 2022 → 9 Jul 2022
Event title	38th European Group for Organisational Studies (EGOS) Colloquium 2022
Event type	Conference
Location	Vienna, AustriaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International