RESPONSIBLE ENTREPRENEURSHIP VISION DEVELOPMENT AND ETHICS

60 RESPONSIBLE ENTREPRENEURSHIP
advisors or being included by their grandchildren in YouTube tutorials. The trend is visible
in all domains, from ordinary senior graffiti-creators in Portugal encouraged by LATA 65, an
organization that aims to connect generations through contemporary art manifestations to
famous people such as US Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg who, through her continuous
activity, has become a model for all generations and also a pop icon. The United States,
France, China and most nations have introduced programs that envision a better life for the
elderly, mostly through technology innovations that can prove useful for seniors. A clear example
that such initiatives have a real echo is offered by Brazilian CNA English School and
their Speaking Exchange program, which connects young people who want to learn English
and seniors through the Internet in an attempt to improve learning by making it real and human.
It, thus, becomes imperative to understand how elders perceive and employ such technologies
and how they approach new media and innovation in a broader sense. The PAR
approach could prove useful in this regard, mainly because it offers a greater level of involvement
from senior participants than other research methods and because of its collaborative,
performative and contextualized nature. Most participatory research designs offer closer-toreality
results that can be used in practice, therefore helping entrepreneurs achieve their business
goals and even improve society. Our declared objective is to obtain results that can be
included in areas like software development, device creation, program implementation etc.
We expect that our findings will be of use especially to the new business rising stars, social
entrepreneurs that aim to offer solutions to society’s most pressing problems. Furthermore,
insights such as these can also prove useful to businesses that center around collaboration
and co-creation with consumers, concepts that have undisputedly demonstrated their efficiency
in product research and development.
Conclusions
The need for a more action-oriented research that could provide real opportunities for developing
research processes with people rather than for people (McIntyre, 2008) lead to an increasing
interest and use of Participatory Action Research approach in addressing a wide variety
of topics coming from different fields of action.
We focused our discussion on the particularities of Participatory Action Research in the
area of technology creation and appropriation, first as a model of involving users in co-creation
of the designing product, in all stages of the research process, and then as a way to involve
end-users of different type of technologies in research and development areas. Moreover, focusing
on the Ethnographic approach and Photo Voice, we find both PAR techniques to be highly
relevant and resourceful in studying (social) media practices among older generations.
Although studies which implement PAR to address ICT use and appropriation are scarce,
we argue that such methodological option could be valuable when researching the overlapping
process of active ageing and technology adoption among older people, especially when
it comes to new media and the new social practices they brought along. This could not only
help in understanding the reasons and positions that are to be found among older people when
it comes to communication and information technology, as compared to other generations,
but also the in terms of the actual content that is generated by them in and through this medium.
In this regard, the Photo Voice could be implemented as a successful technique in building
a PAR design. Moreover, the benefits of using PAR with old participants need to be discussed