The Social Innovation Journey: Emerging challenges for service design for the incubation of social innovation

This chapter contributes to the ongoing debate about design and social innovation and relates it to the practice of service design. Moving from the experience of a team of service designers and social business developers based in Milan, the essay incorporates the lessons learnt from their participation in the European project TRANSITION. It describes a methodological path developed for the incubation of social innovation, namely the social innovation journey (SIJ), designed to offer a simple and customizable professional tool to practitioners. The chapter also presents a first set of arguments on the specificities of social innovation and on the kinds of venture it can generate. It also discusses how service design can be instrumental to social innovation and how it can be integrated with other competences, within incubation processes that are specifically conceived for social innovations. Finally, the emerging challenges for service design are presented. These are associated with the need not only to incubate social innovation but also to encourage it by creating local ecosystems with a cultural, political and regulatory aptitude to experiment that will actually facilitate it.