Making Time for Social Innovation: How to Interweave Clock Time and Event Time in Open Social Innovation to Nurture Idea Generation and Social Impact
基于对OpenIDEO平台40个月的民族志研究，揭示了组织如何通过映射、拉伸和压缩时间三种实践来交织时钟时间和事件时间，从而促进创意生成并实现可持续社会影响。
With the growing complexity of social and environmental issues, there has been a blossoming of hackathons and open innovation challenges. This push to accelerate innovation embraces a perspective of time as clock time—conceived as objective, linear, measurable, and therefore, rather easy to compress. Such a view of time conflicts with the emergent nature of idea generation and the indeterminate process that leads to social impact, which both rely on event time. Drawing on a 40-month ethnographic study of OpenIDEO, an open social innovation platform, I examine how, in designing open innovation challenges, the OpenIDEO team interwove clock time and event time in order to foster idea generation and support social impact. Through inductive analysis, I identify three practices—mapping, stretching, and squeezing time—enacted by the OpenIDEO team to “make time” and thus, continuously engage participants and sponsors in the challenges as well as to allow participants to implement their ideas. My findings demonstrate how organizations can intentionally use time to nurture collaborative innovation and yield sustainable social impact. My study questions the traditional interpretation of clock time as the foundation of all temporalities as it shows how temporal work can be grounded within event time. Funding: This work was supported by the National Science Foundation [NSF VOSS Grant 1122381]. The research was partially funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement no. 951735.