A new Methodology to measure Social Innovation
With the resonance analysis, IndiSI breaks new ground in the development of indicators for measuring social innovations and addresses the gap of missing established foresight methods in this area. It examines the early stages of the emergence processes of social innovations, starting with the identification and perception of social needs. Tracking online discourses using resonance indicators allows us to understand the perception of pressing social needs in context, as well as to identify proposals for new solutions and actors driving them. The relevance of social needs is not governed by objective parameters but is negotiated and constructed in societal discourses.
The resonance indicator measures how perceived social needs resonate with other actors, i.e., how awareness about them is raised, how their legitimacy and solution strategies are formed, and how resources for their implementation are mobilized. For this purpose, we use social media and observed and evaluated Twitter discourses in the German context on thematic fields of action of social innovations (climate/environment, education, health, social affairs, mobility).
The concept of "resonance" was developed in the context of IndiSI and introduced into innovation measurement for the first time. The resonance indicator is based on a process-oriented perspective - the understanding of social innovations as intentional processes of institutionalizing new social action practices, starting with identifying social needs.