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kind of collective intelligence that ClayShirky (2010) calls cognitive surplus,
like citizens ability to seize their free time and talent to be volunteers, to
contribute or collaborate in big projects that improve everybody life in the
society, in a digital technologies environment.
These new kind of collective intelligence and collaborative projects are
changing quickly our society, giving responsibility and participation back to
citizens in the searching of solution to those problems experimented by
themselves directly. And this new network of social change is what we call
citizen innovation, and we define it as the active participation of citizens in
innovative initiatives which looks for transform the social reality, through
digital technologies, for the purpose of reach a higher social inclusion.
Given the immediacy and contemporary of this new way of innovation,
there are not still indices to measure their impacts, though it has been
evidenced significant social, cultural, politic and economic benefits to our
communities/neighbourhoods/cities/countries.
Part of the difficulties that institutions are given to citizen innovation approach;
they are in part because it is a bottom-up creation process, it
comes from citizen basis independently of the relationship with institutions,
and that’s why it’s very difficult to get close without affecting his process
that, by his own nature, is participative and horizontal. It doesn’t mean
that governments or organizations can’t contribute to citizen innovation.
In this sense, the best approach is to stimulate the conditions in order to
generate more and better citizen innovation. As an example, from the
State and government institutions through the implementation of politics
that eliminate barriers to innovative initiatives, or the generation of autonomous
spaces to boost them, facilitating his funding, assigning a percentage
of governmental budgets, and prioritizing actions that guarantee the
access to digital technologies and reduce the digital gap.
Organizations as well can boost the citizen innovation through a change of
the approach of the Enterprise Social Responsibility focusing on a strengthening
of citizen innovation in a position of reciprocity with the community in
initiatives like creation and support of citizen innovation spaces (citizen
labs, social start-up, etc.), or replicating good practises and project that
have shown their efficacy in other places, assessing his viability in the new
context.
These and other proposals for the boost of the citizen innovation are collected
in a letter recently given to the 22 Chiefs of Estate in the Ibero-