Toward a Political Theory of Social Innovation: Collective Intelligence and Co-Creation of Social Goods

• In Event: Social Innovation in Open Laboratory and Public Scholarship: Organizing the Reimagination of Our Societies?!

Abstract

This paper explores literature relevant to the formation of a political theory of social innovation that aims to produce social goods through the formation of collective intelligence and co-creation. The discussion engages with a range of theoretical perspectives on social and open innovation, and innovation ecosystems with an interest articulating how open participation might enable the changing of relationships, positions and rules among stakeholders who have a vested interest in the formation of social goods. The paper proceeds with a brief history of collective intelligence and a discussion on problems related to the development and orientation of this field. This discussion engages with a series of perspectives including those found in the literatures of biology (re “swarm intelligence” and social insects), politics (re epistemic democracy), administration and public policy (re co-creation and co-production of public services, peer production), cognitive science (re the embodied mind, social cognition), technology (re AI, machine learning, genetic algorithms, learning analytics, open-source software) and evolution studies (re the “global brain,” “noosphere”). Prominent in this exposition will be the thinking of Pierre Lévy and the implications for learning (see Lévy, 2015) that emerge from his description of “the knowledge space” (Lévy, 1997). The purpose of this particular focus on social innovation is to identify key elements in the innovation ecosystem that enable the bottom-up involvement of students in the process of collective ideation, with the intention that their learning contribute to the development of new collective forms of consciousness, awareness, intelligence, responsibility and action in a user-generated and participatory-based peer-to-peer co-creation and co-production. Our interest in this paper is the application of collective intelligence and associated forms based on collective awareness engendering collective action that can deliver a political theory and practice of social innovation. We are especially interested in new forms and ways of delivering social goods and services through forms of co-creation and co-production. There are some interesting examples of this kind of thinking that, after the neoliberal era, have led to the discovery of the importance of yoking together development research and innovation in pursuit of social equality and justice. However, while Web 2.0 applications are well suited to sharing information and harnessing the power of user-generated groups, they have less success in structuring discourse in online deliberation as a rational process. Co-creation and co-production through networked engagement on platforms that facilitate interdisciplinary ideation would require a transformation of the way power is administered in the university for students to be actors in social innovation. To take truly “bottom-up, open and distributed approaches” that would exploit the existing network effects that are constantly emerging in student learning and research supposes a break with the present institutional model and the vitalization of learning institutions. We are only at the beginning of the epoch of digital reason (Peters, 2014) and we are early in our understanding of the processes of digitization that seemingly makes possible collective intelligence through open and social innovation.

Authors

• Michael A. Peters, The University of Waikato

• Richard Heraud, Waikato University

• Andrew Gibbons, The University of Auckland